Anarchy For The Masses: The Disinformation Guide to The Invisibles

THE mpmeabtbfkdsorr#rklkrftda~ A complete guide to every issue of THEINVISIBLES, featuring exclusive interviews with G...

Author: Patrick Neighly | Kereth Cowe-Spigai

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THE

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A complete guide to every issue of THEINVISIBLES, featuring exclusive interviews with Grant Morrison and major behind-the-scenes players including Philip Bond, Phil Jimenez, Stuart Moore, Sean Phillips, Warren Pleece, Frank Quitely, Cameron Stewart, Jill Thompson, Chris Weston and Steve Yeowell. Plus comprehensive annotations, critical analyses, never-before-published artwork and more!

ISBN 0-9713942-2-9

ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES

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53 "[Now why] would anyone have that printed on the side of a can of

Copyright O 2003 Patrick Neighly and Kereth Cowe-Spigai Published by The Disinfomation Company Ltd. 163 Third Avenue, Suite 108 New York, NY 10003 Tel.: +1.212.529.2330 Fax: +1.212.387.8152 www.disinfo.com An earlier edition of this book was published by Mad Yak Press LLC. This revised DisinformationB edition is published by arrangement with Mad Yak Press and the authors.

Design, colors and layout: Anne Marie Horne for Claudehaus.com Cover art: Frank Quitely Interior art: Frank Quitely, Chris Weston and Steve Yeowell

tomatoes?"

Original series covers: Copyright 0 1994-2000 DC Comics First Printing January 2003 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a database or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means now existing or later discovered, including without limitation mechanical, electronic, photographic or otherwise, without the express prior written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Control Number: 2002109415 ISBN: 0-9713942-2-9 Printed in the United States of America Distributed in the United States and Canada by: Consortium Book Sales and Distribution 1045 Westgate Drive, Suite 90 St Paul, MN 55114 Toll Free: +1.800.283.3572 Local: +1.651.221.9035 Fax: +1.651.221.0124 www.cbsd.com w

disinformation

Distributed in the United Kingdom and Eire by: Turnaround Publisher Services Ltd. Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate Coburg Road London, N22 6TZ Tel.: +44.20.8829.3000 Fax: +44.20.8881.5088 www.h~rnaround-uk.com

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"REALIN IS THAT WHICH, WHEN YOU STOP BELIMNG IN IT, DOESN'T GO AWAY.'' Philip K Dick

Thanks to Gary Baddeley, Philip Bond, Jeff Heesch, Phil Jimenez, Richard Metzger, Stuart Moore, Sean Phillips, Warren Pleece, Frank Quitely, Cameron Stewart, Jill Thompson, Chris Weston and Steve Yeowell. Special thanks to Grant Morrison.

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"This isn't

a story. It's not about anything. Read it if

you like."

Disinformation is a registered trademark of The Disinformation Company Ltd. fnord! All characters, their distinctive likenesses and related indicia featured herein are trademarks of Grant Morrison and are used with permission. The opinions and statements made in this book are those of the authors and/or the interviewees. The Disinformation Company Ltd. has not verified and neither confirms nor denies any of the foregoing and no warranty or fitness is implied. The reader is encouraged to keep an open mind and to independently judge for himself or herself the validity of such opinions and statements. The Disinformation Company Ltd. shall have no liability or responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage arising from the information contained in this book or from the use thereof or reliance thereon.




PATRICK NEIGHLY KERETH COWE-SPIGAI

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S "Your search


TABLE OF CONTENTS

for value is part of your pathology."

Introduction

009

Volume One

011

Volume Two

093

Volume Three

167

Short Stories

219

Talking with Grant M o r r i s o n 2 2 9 Biographies

259

Bibliography

286

Illustration by Steve Yeowell

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"Hasn't it


INTRODUCTION

occurred to you how

strange all of this is?"

Don't believe anything you read in this book. A strange way to open, to be sure, but taking any interpretation of THEINVISIBLES as definitive is to miss the point altogether. What we offer here is our interpretation, based on deep reading, extensive research, interviews with the series' creators and a healthy dollop of common sense.

In this book you'll find critical analyses of the series as a whole, its themes, characters, covers and even individual panels themselves. The series is analyzed volume by volume, issue by issue. Implicit in the authodreader relationship for this book is that you have already read the complete series. Anarchy For the Masses is a companion to an understanding of THEINVISIBLES, not a substitute for it. Brief summaries are included of each issue and the two short stories for readers who may have gaps in their personal collections - although of course w e recommend obtaining the trade paperback compilations published by DC/Vertigo. But because the reader is assumed to already be familiar with THE INVISIBLES, individual chapters may make reference to future events and themes without pause.


Throughout the issue guide portion of the book you will find extensive panelby-panel annotations. These are intended to aid readers who may not be familiar with aspects of history, magical tradition, religion, mythology, science or popular culture. Sometimes they merely point out an interesting composition or examine a particular detail from a specific panel. Others denote the first appearance of recurring characters, which is often not when some readers think they first appear. Our annotation format follows a descending hierarchy of volume, issue, page, panel. Thus 1.2.3.4 refers to Volume 1, issue two, page three, panel four. Annotations only include volume and issue locators for references outside of the actual issue discussed in a particular chapter. Also included are biographies of key players in THE INVISIBLES, charting their often-convoluted personal histories and character development. While there's nothing in here that isn't revealed in the series itself, it's occasionally useful to consider, for example, Ragged Robin's story in a linear form. Scattered among the issue guide are boxes.exploring key elements or themes in more detail. Comments from many of the series' creators are included, where appropriate, based on exclusive interviews conducted especially for this book. And series creator Grant Morrison expands on his infamous alien download and thoughts on THEINVISIRLES' creation and cosmology in an extended discussion never before published, augmenting his illuminating commentary elsewhere in the book.

Anarchy for the Masses is designed to mimic the non-linear narrative of THE INVISIBLES itself. Every page offers multiple points of entry, scattered bursts of information to be absorbed page by page amid a pile of issues or holistically in a series of trips to the bathroom. For intelligent discussion of THEINVISIBLES and other works of Grant Morrison, we recommend the excellent Barbelith community at www.barbelith.com. Grant Morrison's personal Web site can be found at -.grant-morrison.com. For alternate INVISIBLES annotations, discussion and other information:

The Disinformation Web site contains several articles and dossiers on the topics of Grant and THEINVISIRLES:

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"His skill makes us believe that we see a war between two


great armies,

VOLUME I

but there is no war. There is only the

dalang."

"Fuck!"

DEAD BEATLES SEP 94 Grant Morrison Writer Steve Yeowell Art Daniel Vozzo Colors Electric Crayon Color Separations Clem Robins Letters Julie Rottenberg Assistant Editor Stuart Moore Editor Rian Hughes Cover

Dane McGowan follows a psychic vision of Beatles Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon by spending a rowdy night with friends in Liverpool, England, stealing a car, assaulting a teacher and ultimately burning down their school. He and his pal Gaz are sentenced to ten weeks at Harmony House, an ostensible corrections school that is in reality run by a monstrous archon to brainwash kids into conformity. But just as he discovers this secret, Dane is freed by the mysterious revolutionary King Mob and abandoned in London.


GRANT MORRISON ON CREATING THE l ~ 5 l B L E 5

Had the ideas for the book been kicking around in your head for a while before you wrote the series' proposal?

1 1 The first line in the series illustrates some of ~ t major s themes. "And so we return and begin again." This touches on the fractal nature of real~ty. the life cycle from supercontext back to supercontext and even l ~ f eas a v~deogame. The first Image in the series of three volumes shows the three pyram~dsof Gza, wh~chnot coincidentally housed Egyptian nob~lityIn the afterl~fe.They were also adorned w ~ t hmessages wrlnen in hieroglyphics, a pictogram-based system Contrast this with the emphas~splaced on deconstructlng alphabet~clanguage later In the serles

12 F~rstappearance of King Mob F~rstappearance of Elfayed, who here describes the ~ n ~ t ~ a teach i o n lnv~siblewill undergo prlor to contact with BARBELiTH. Khephra IS a beetle that carrles the sun in Egyptian mythology. 1.4 "Nice and smooth" is King M o b catch phrase, taken from the Kinks'song David Warts 1.5 A nearly eponymous dead beetle Its mummlf~cation ties into the meaning behind the pyramids from the f~rstpanel and underl~nesthe theme of reb~rth

2 F~rstappearance of Dane McGowan HISname rhymes with that of Irish rock snger Shane McGowan. "McGowan" means "blacksm~th" DeadBeatlesplays with the Khephra metaphor, the Lennon/Sutcl~ffesequence and the Idea that Dane and his friends are deadbeats Perhaps not so interestingly, the Vertigo Prevrew uncorrected proof uses a different font and layout for the story title and cred~tsbox. Electric Crayon are Marc Siry and Steve Buccellato 3.3 Note that Dane IS destroying a library Replac~ngcurrent mindsets w ~ t ha new parad~gmIS a key theme of THEINVISBLES. 4.1 F~rstappearance of Gaz The Carlsberg brewery sponsors L~verpoolFootball Club Dane's wearing a home sh~lt 4.4 Note the King Mob grafft~ Everton is a Premier League Liverpool football team ~'roxtethHall Country Park is a country estate open to the publ~c.managed by the City of Liverpool. Note the GM graffiti; Grant IS already imprinting himself Into the series.

In a lot of ways, yeah, because there's always something kicking in the head. I came to it through every other comic that I'd done, I think. It just kind of summed up all the themes and ideas that I'd been pursuing through everything else. I became even more shocked when I looked back, because all throughout it I'd kept referencing back to earlier work and kind of drawing in elements and trying to make this a compendium of everything I'd ever done. And I found that even the earliest work I'd done, which was something like ZOIDSfor Marvel UK - the toy tie-in, you know, which was a stupid comic - I really did the best I could back then. I was pretty ambitious; I was trying to make it interesting. And that contains all the themes of THEINVISIBLES in a toy comic. So yeah, it was always there. But also the comic itself came about because I was on a tour with Steve Yeowell and Jill Thompson promoting the early Vertigo books, because SERASTIAN 0 was out at the time and she was on SANDMAN probably. We talked about doing something. I had this vague idea for a big alternate series, kind of summing u p all my interests. They all came from different areas, because most of them were based on things I'd intended to d o in DC series. So the actual INVISIRLES stuff is THE BOY COMMANDOES, the Jack Kirby comic. I just loved the title, because it seemed like a classic William Burroughs title. I had this notion that we'd do THEBOY COMMANDOES but as a psychic scouts organization, because I had this weird dream that I'd found T%e Psychic Scouts' Handbook and thought, I'll use this one! I'd read all this stuff about [Boy Scouts founder] BadenPowell. It's quite an interesting, weirdo thing derived from Baden-Powell in Africa and led into what would - the time travel stuff. have been similar to THEINVISIBLES But I think it was a lot wilder and a lot more Burroughslike in the sense that it didn't even have a central story, it wasn't as connected to the real world. When we were out there in San Francisco, we went to this 50 Years of LSD celebration rave, and the whole thing started to come together then. I realized I had to talk to the mass culture which was emerging at the time, the psychedelic culture based on the dance culture that had hit America. That was '93, so it was kind of big in San Francisco at the time. It seemed like people were starting to push

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"We are the boys!" is e play on -We are the modsl" from the 1979 fllm Quadrophenia.

52 Atom bombs ere a major theme of Volume 2. 5.4 Note 'Gal' graff~ti.Dane and his friends loiter.

through frontiers again that they hadn't been looking at in the yuppie era, and that suited me because I've always been interested in the fringe areas of thought. So it seemed a way to talk about the actual world and the way things were changing. And then of course the alien abduction experience happened later, which became what THEINVISIBLES is actually about.

6 2 First appearance of Edith Manning

72 Mutual Aidsuggests that Darwin's theory of evolution was too heavlly influenced by capitalist and h~erarchicalthought, and that success in nature is not defined by competit~onbut rather by cooperation. The class lecture on revolutionend Mutual Aidestablishes that THEINVISIBLES w ~ lbe. l among other things, e political allegory Russian wrlter Peter Kropotkin (1@42-1921) spent most of h ~ early s years in military service. He lost faith in the government and became a revolut~onary. writing and d~str~but~ng anarch~stand socialist pamphlets to the poor and producing articles for socialist publications

The bottom line is there were a lot of different things. The King Mob character was based o n ... DC had a n old character called The Whip from the '40s. No one had ever touched it; I found it and thought that was great, I can d o this real kind of S&M superhero. The Whip is basically King Mob. The original designs for that, I just had this character who was bald and based on the fetish stuff at the time, which again was established in the underground and magazines like Skin Two [specifically photographs of clothing by Craig Morrison].

The Bolshevik Revolut~onoccurred In 1917 when the Russ~anBolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924).seized control of the prov~s~onal government In Russia. This marked the rise of Lenin and the Soviets and led to the formation of the USSR. Kropotk~ndenounced the Bolsheviks on the grounds that they were, at their core, a political entlty seek~ngcentralized power for themselves. no different from the Tsars. Flrst appearanceof Mister Six, here in his Brian Malcolm guise.

He's got [the Hood's1 eyebrows, which then became Dan Dare's eyebrows. It was a nice touch. Now that I think back, I said to Steven, "I think King Mob looks like Daniel Day-Lewis with his head shaved," and in the very first image in issue one, first page of issue one, he actually does look like Daniel Day-Lewis, it's a Daniel Day-Lewis face. But then he becomes himself.

7.4The October Revolut~on1s another name for the Bolshevik Revolut~on

SWART MOORE ON VERTIGO'S FIRST CREATOR-OWNED SERIES

7.5 Molotov refers to the Molotov Cocktail Dane used to blow up the library A Molotov Cocktail is a simple bomb made by filling a glass bottle with gasoline. A rag wick is lit before the battle is thrown. The Molotov Cocktall IS named for Vyacheslav Molotov (1890-1986).chairman of the Councll of People's Commissars of the USSR under Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) When he ordered the Red Army to Invade F~nland,they were met with these highly effective homemade bombs

How did you first meet Grant?

9 2 UK to US. arse = ass. Here itk slang for "can't be bothered." 9.6 Note the anarchy symbol and King Mob graff~ti.

There ought to be some answer involving talking cats, opium bowls the size of shark tanks, and ancient rune-

103 Dane IS able to transcend the apparent linearity of time here, establishinganother major theme of the series. Lennon and Sutcl~ffewere the only two dead Beatles when this issue was publ~shed

10.5 S~nger-songwriterJohn Lennon (1940-19801 IS generally regarded as the foremost member of the Beatles. Interestingly. Lennon and Lenin are homophones: both men are revolutionaries In different ways

Stuan Sutcliffe 11940-1962)was one of the founding members of The Beatles He left the band in 1961 to be w ~ t hhis new found love. Astrid. He died the following year of a brain hemorrhage. 11.2 Amer~canactor James Dean (1931-1955) is best known for his role in Rehl W~thouta Cause and a fatal car crash. His enduring fame is attributed to the notion that Dean somehow embodied the hopes and fears of all generations of youth

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French actress Brigitte Bardot (b.1934) was a sex symbol in films such as AndGod Created Women


observed phenomenonthat only slightly different initial conditions in a system can result in drastically different outcomes. 12.2 This sequence demonstrates how time bends around Dane. Mark David Chapman 1b.19551 yelled. "Mr. Lennon!" just before shooting him. The "car backfiringn on the next panel is the gunshot report. Both 1961 and 1980 are bleeding into 1995. All times being one is a recurring theme.

carved passageways, but it was probably at a convention. The truth is that I don't remember - obviously they made me forget.

12.4 "More like we're fucking alive and don't know i t '"Another recurring theme is the notion that we are unaware of our true nature, sleeping through existence without really living

How did editing the first volume of THEINVISIBLES come about? Were you present at the pitch stage?

13.2 First appearance of Jack Frost 13.3 Jack Frost is speaking in German Roughly "Good earthly method Strong owner Psychic land " "Come home. The reverse of the moon.'' Both BARBELiTHS location and its repeating message. 14.1 UK to US: TDA (taking and driving away) =grand theft auto. UK to US. wanker = derogatory slang for one who obsessively masturbates UK to US: pissed = drunk.

Karen Berger wasn't editing much anymore herself, Art Young was doing limited series exclusively, and Tom Peyer had left staff, so as I recall Grant just kind of faxed it over to me with a note that said, "I guess you get this." It was pretty fully formed. How much input did you have during the early days, when the original Psychic Boy Scouts idea was hammered into what would become THE ~NVIS~BLES?

14.4 UK to US: n~ck= steal 14.5 Naturally Dane steals an Astra, the name may foreshadow the cosmic nature of the series and suggests his powers on the astral plane. 16.2 E is slang for the drug ecstasy, MDMA Its use is characterized by increased sensitivity of all senses, feelings of love and acceptance, ego softening, and euphoria. 17.4 UK to US. shite = shit. Dane basically describes the enemy here. And the Invisibles, too. 18.1 Chaos magick, which Grant practices. plays an important role in the series. It allows the practitioner to develop his or her own bel~eflsymbolsystems accord~ngto specific need King Mob is pelforming an invocation for the purpose of divination This particular ritual begins with the hallucinogen LSD to enter gnosis, a state of increased sensitivity and awareness. The following banishing ritual will protect King Mob while he's in this vulnerable state The paisley shirt, Rickenbackershort arm guitar and Chelsea boots are all items associated with John Lennon and a ~ din King Mob's invocation The Beatles albums picturedare RubberSoui. Remlverand Sgt. Pepper's LonelyHeaB Club Band This invocationis inspiredby an actual experience Grant Morrison had. 182 John Lennon had an affinity for the number nine. Revolution 9 is a series of random sound clips, found on the Whrte Album. Nine is also the number of Ganesh and the only number that becomes a different number ups~dedown - six Lennon once said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ, here one of them is a god Ganesh is the elephant-headed Hindu god of removing obstacles. Chaos magick allows King Mob to create a belief system that integrates rock psychedelia with traditional Hindu bel~efs 19.1 Tibetan prayer wheels. or manr. are strips printed with the mantra om manipadme hum. encased in spinning cylinder Saying this mantm invokes Chenrezig, the embodiment of compassion. Here the pun refers to CDs or records. A mantra is a sacred verbal expression from the

None whatsoever. I've never heard the phrase "Psychic Boy Scouts." Or ... have I? Grant said he had editorial problems with the Marquis de Sade issue from Karen. What was the issue there? What was the breakdown of responsibility between the pair of you? What was your normal process per issue? How often did the rougher edges such as the original Marquis story have to get smoothed over?

Well, you have to remember that THE INVISIBLES was Vertigo's first creator-owned ongoing series, and we were feeling around as to what we were comfortable publishing in such a book (as opposed to what a DCowned character book would allow). At the same time, the culture was undergoing a sea change around us in terms of allowable language, violence and sexual portrayals. The Marquis de Sade story was kind of a test for all of us. There were no changes made that affected the core story; it was all language and art details - clothing adjusted to cover a bit more, extreme language toned down. I would show script and art to Karen as they came in, and probably Jenette Kahn - I don't remember all the details, but she was usually the last word on these matters at that time. As I recall, Grant was unhappy with the changes, in part because material started appearing soon in PREACHER that was at least as rough. To that extent he had a point - as I said, we had no hard-and-fast rules written down, and these things are very much subject to interpretation based on context. But I don't think any of the changes compromised the story.

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Hindu tradition that IS repeated In prayer or in a ritual, such as the invocationof a God. Mantras can aid the practitioner in attaining a state of gnosis. "Looking glass language" refers to glossolalia, the supercontext and the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds How language influences reality IS another recurring theme of the series.

STEVE YEOWELL ON DRAWING THE INVISBLES

Grant had explained in general terms the concept behind THEINVISIBLESto Jill Thompson and myself during our leg of the Vertigo "Spin Across America" signing tour of 1993. I'd a couple of project proposals in the pipeline at the time, so despite being tempted when he asked if I wanted to become involved, I decided to decline.

"Revolving head revolver"mey refer to the head of John the Baptist from 1.8, who mentions a different solt of revolution. Revolver is a Beatles album.

19.2 The eggman is from l a m the Walrus from the Beatles' MagicalMystery Touralbum. One theory holds that John Lennon purposefully created nonsens~callyrics to befuddle an education establishmentthat was making Beatles lyrics a part of the curriculum The first line of the song is significant to THEINVISIBLES: "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together" The machine elves that appear on 3.6 4.2 could be described as eggmen.

DC eventually accepted Grant's proposal. Jill was supposed to be drawing the first couple of story arcs, but because of other commitments, wasn't able to meet the schedule that DC, who were keen to get the whole thing under way, wanted. In the meantime, I'd finished my current projects and the other proposals had all come to nothing so I was looking around for work. THEINVISIBLES came up in conversation and it was suggested that I draw the first story arc and Jill draw the second.

"Let me take you down'' is from the Beatles song Strawberry F~eldsForever, which explores self. consciousness and perception.

19.3 "It IS not dying" refers to both THEINVISIBLES' theoryof death and Tomorrow Never Knowsfrom the Beatles album Revolver "Say the w o r d is a refrain from the Beatles song The Word The word. ~nc~dentally. 1s love. 19.4 Apple is the Beatles' record label. It is also symbolic of forb~ddenknowledge in Christian mythology Apples will reappear throughout the series as a recurring image.

What were your feelings on launching the series?

There was a quality to the proposal that, for me, made it the most exciting thing Grant had come up with since ZENITH.It enthused me enough to work extra hard on that first issue. I thought it was a good solid story with enough intrigue to keep readers interested, so I had high hopes. I was actually quite pleased with the advance orders about 70,000-90,000 I think - although DC were disappointed. Not surprising really - advances for first issues were much higher at the time.

PN: THEINVISIBLES begins with a bang- almost literally. Like any good fractal, the entire series is contained in this single issue, which takes advantage of its extra pages to provide a self-contained stoy about Harmony House that serves as a nice intro to Dane's character. mere are some nice ideaspresent, including the notion of invokingJohn Lennon as a god and Gelt reincarnating as a beetle. Ironic mention must be given to the coincidental back cover, an advertisement for the film Natural Born Killers featuring a photo of actor Woody Harrelson looking much like King Mob. m e major themes of the series are present from the very first line, which describes thefractal nature of reality and takes on an unexpected twist by thefinal issue, through to the recurring statements aboutpolitics, rebellion, conformity, rebirth and even the binary nature of reality. All in all a great start to an iconic series.

ANARCHY FOR THE Y I I I E I

"Bonnie Jock Lennon is dead and goon" refers to LennonS assassination. Beautiful Boy is a song from John Lennon's 1980 album Double Fantasy, about his son Sean.

212 UK to US. b~zzies= cops. 21.3 "Other ways" implies iateral thinking, another serles theme

22 The judge's language is reminiscent of Anthony Burgess' 11917-1993) 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange As the title suggests, the book is about the uselessnessof trytng to mechanize a livlng organtsm- specifically a form of aversion therapy the government admin~stersto a young hooligan. The presence of the judge adds a second oppressive institution -after education - to Dane's life.

225 The quotation marks around the word rebellion delegit~mirest , touching on language as realiry 23.2 Flrst appearance of Miss Dvvyer. Several of the ser~es'villains wear similar glasses. If eyes are the window to the soul, they may be hiding their soulless nature. Ohyeris Gaelic for "dark one.'' Note that Dane wears the same clothes for several days - this 1s generally a symptom of depression.

23.3 '"Worry" holds dual meanings here. 23.4 Note the irony of the name Harmony House Music recurs as a leitmot~fin relationto the v~llains 242 Gelt's speech echoes the Invisibles' own posttion. Another recurring theme is the similarity betweenthe opposing sides. 24.5 Boy reiterates GeltS sentiments here in 1 7 19 4. Both sides being the same is a theme

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25.3 The yeslno playing cards are e binary system. not only suggesting that Harmony House is programming the boys like machines but also

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establishing another recurring theme, that the universe is a binaty system.

25.4 Gelt means "castrated one." 26.1 The tarot is a divinatory card system. Isxis, the moon. IS card 19 in the tarot. It is the darkness that gives b~rthto light, echoing the rebirth theme first shown with Khephra.

262 First appearance of Ragged Robin. A ragged robin is both the plant Lychnrs floscuculiand an overly made-up woman in ragged clothes. 263 King Mob? outfit here is based on clothing shown In the fetish magazine Skin Two 272 The lnvisiblesare in a classroom here, an suggesting they essentiallywant the same thing of Dane as the enemy. Note the apple. Why does Robin express skepticism over the tarot if she knows Fanny and Jim Crow? We never do learn why Fanny is at the Academy

27.4 Note that King Mob wears a mask, just as Gelt and Miss Dwyer do Both sides are the same. "Spy series." Reality as fiction is a recurring theme.

28.4 The poster suggests that Harmony House is a public institution that doesn't hide its mission. A recurring theme is that the forces of oppression are so ingrained in daily life that we don't even notice them

ZU.5 UK to US: two fingers is the equivalent of the middle finger. A Yuck you" gesture.

233 First appearanceof the King-of-all-Tears. Here he's called the "King-in-Chains," suggesting submission. Combined with "unborn and barren" we have the enemy in a nutshell - devoid of life and requiring slave% 23.4 Gelt has literally been castrated, and had his sight removed as well. He is now without humanitfs chief means of perce~vingthe world 302 Dane IS running from Gelt to the archon from the phantom menace to the real thing? 313 Gaz is speaking in binary 321 The Conspiracy removes souls literally as well as metaphorically 333 "It\ not good to wake up" is the opposlte of BARBELiTHSmessage. 33.5 "Smooth between the legs, smooth between the ears." like Gelt himself. Note Gelt is posed as though wearlng handcuffs, in submission.

35 King Mob shoots the guards in the crotch and head, echoing Gelt.

35.3 First appearance of Bobby Murray. 35.4 "This isn't happening " Denial of reality is a recurring theme.

362 Begg~ngfor submission is a recurring theme. 36.5 Goodbye Mr Chips is a book by James Hilton (19001954)about an English headmasterwho falls for a younger girl. 38.1 "Not Gaz." Harmony House, like the institution in A Clockwork Orange. appears to be a limited program, as Gaz is eventuallyreleased. 382 The insect is Gelt.

40.2 Dane's first and last words in this issue are "fuck," echo~ngElfayed'scyclical opening line.

KCS: Well, this series k i c k off with a bang. Take one Warholesquegrenade cover, add a few molotovs and guns. Mix well. Garnish with a few '~ucks, '"shites"and "arses" and you've got yourself one tasty treat. But for all the piss and vinegar, thefirst issue of 7 h I~ m ~ treats m the reader to more subtle and complexJavors. 7befirstpageprovides a beautiful summary of the series' cosmology and as the issue progresses, we get to nibble at the edges of Dane's psyche - his past and future, his anger, his sensitivity. Yeowell's art is fitting for Dane's stoly, encapsulating his relative innocence. And Grant contrasts this well with a jaded, if overdone, King Mob. John Lennon as a god is a fantastic idea, even if the presentation is a bit arduous. And our introduction to the Conspiracy (especially the vagina-headed King-in-Chains) provides a healthy dose of ickies. But you never really know how great thefirst issue is until you've read the whole series. "

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"When was the last time

PART ONE

DOWN AND OUT IN HEAVEN AND HELL

you had a thought OCT 94 Grant Morrison Writer

that wasn't

Steve Yeowell Alt Daniel Vozzo Colors

Electric Crayon Color Separations Clem Robins Letters Julie Rottenberg Assistant Editor Stuart Moore Editor Sean Phillips Cover

Dane has been homeless for some time and has partnered with a young punk, unaware (as is the reader) that the Invisibles are keeping tabs on him. He meets the seemingly barmy Tom O'Bedlam, who takes him on a journey of magical initiation in which Dane sees an alternate London and has hallucinogenic contact with aliens, who reveal the existence of a dimensional stoplight. Meanwhile, a gang of aristocrats has been hunting the homeless and, after being abandoned by Tom, it appears that Dane is next in their sights.. .

put there by them?"


GRANT MORRISON ON TIME IN THE INWSIBLES The series begins playing with our perception of time almost immediately, when Dane and Tom see Edith and Freddie at the church.

1 The rantings of this conspiracy theorist are both metaphorc and l~teralIn the context of our world. we are all receivers for the bombardment of adven~singand brand culture our corporate giants flood the alrwaves w~th,which alter the way we percetve the world The locat~onIS Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. London, a symbol of free speech on which one may say anything w~thoutfear of arrest. The speaker may be K~ngMob, In keeping with the disgu~sedlnvis~bleselsewhere in th~sIssue. Or. he may be the unnamed hitchhiker seen in 1.14. 1.3 ELFlextremely low frequency) transmitters were used during the Cold War to communicate with submarines. Some conspiracy theorists clalm they are involved in mind control 1.4 "Wake up" IS a recurring theme Note the length of Dane's hair; he's been homeless for some time now. 1.5"When was the last time you had a thought that wasn't put there by them7"Via advertising. law, school 2 Dane may be break~ngthrough the fourth wall to address the reader here, again suggesting the ~nterplaybetween fict~onand really The title is a play on George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, which explores the condltions of the lower classes in those two cltles

That was a long-term plan. After the abduction, the whole series became about time being a single object and what might happen to relationships within it. I began to see how you could d o it within the thing, and time became really important. Especially once you get into the second volume and you start to see there are clocks everywhere and time is everywhere, and it's always now. No matter when it is, it's always now. !iTUART MOORE ON EDITORIAL INFLUENCE How much input did you have over the covers and stories?

Virtually none over the stories. Grant knew exactly what he wanted to do, and the whole thing always felt like such a delicate mosaic to me - scenes and bits of language would recur months or years later, revealing other meanings - that I never wanted to wade in and screw around with it. Grant often had ideas about the covers, and so did Sean Phillips. I don't know that I came up with many ideas from scratch, but we all had our hands in. 9 E V E YEOWELL ON DESIGNING THE INVlSBLES Almost all of the major characters in THEINVISIBLES appeared in your initial story arc. How much leeway did you have in designing the lead characters? What about the ancillary cast (Edith, Mister Six etc.)?

3.5 First appearance of Boy.

DC sent me everything produced thus far - Grant's concept

Note how Dane slowly blends in with the surroundng garbage In ths sequence, both a metaphor for h ~ sgradual decay and also his Inv~sibil~ty.

proposal with his designs for the Jack Frost costume and King Mob's battle dress, and some concept drawings Jill had done: a group shot of King Mob, Fanny, Boy, Ragged Robin (though she had a different name then - I forget what) and Jack Frost.

4.1 Ragged Rob~nThe lnvisibles are keeplng tabs on Dane throughout h ~ s~nltlation. 4 2 F~rstappearance of Kate Sutton. 4.4 Note that Rob~nglves Dane a pound Not out of generosity so much as '"in for a penny,'' perhaps. 4.5Tom is quoting from an anonymous 17th century poem called Tom O'Bedlam English playwr~ghtWilllam Shakespeare 115641616) IS most well known for inflicting agonizing exams on schoolchildren everywhere 5 2 First appearance of Tom O'Bedlam. The mon~kerIS the name assumed by Edgar while pretendlog to be Insane In Shakespeare's King

King Mob's face was hidden under his war mask in all of the drawings, and Grant's description of him wasn't any more concrete than him being bald and kind of tough looking, so I got to design his appearance from scratch I based him on The Hood from 7hunderbirds. The pre-Jack Frost Dane I based on Mark, from British boy band Take That.

,1


Lear The name traditionally refers to a mental patient discharged from Bedlam asylum and left on the streets. Its use in a politicizedcomic book like THEINVISI~LES is likely a critique on the mental health policies of most Western nations, which tend to release mental patients onto the streets to save money

Boy, Fanny and Robin I took pretty much from Jill's concept shot, although I couldn't face drawing Robin's corkscrew hair and altered it! The ancillary cast I designed on the spot as they appeared - using whatever description, if any, Grant had provided in the scripts as a guide.

Most of Tom's quotes on this page are from Shakespeare's King Lear, which suggests that Tom may only be pretending to be mad.

I

5.4 "You thing rike jellyfah pretty soon now" is from William S Burroughs' (b.1937) "cut up" novel Nova Express, 6 3 Planet X is a comic shop in London, although here ~tlooks more like a fashion boutique.

If I took too much leeway then nobody complained!

8 This scene echoes a famous sequence in the 1977 George Lucaslb.1944)film Star Wars. in which the hermit Obi-Wan Kenobi misdirectsa soldier looking for Luke Skywalker, who like Dane will apprentice into a mystical rebellion. Life as f~ction.

How do you balance accuracy versus storytelling needs in regard to real locations and people (e.g. Egypt, Liverpool, the Beatles)?

9 2 The quote is from King Lear lll.iv and is incorrect, In that only the Prince of Darkness is another name for Satan. Modo and Mahu are lesser demons

I tend to go for accuracy in the broad sense whilst not

worrying about the details. I'll use well known images for establishing scenes as it seems to me that there are some shots of famous landmarks that have become so familiar that not using them means you risk the reader not recognizing the location.

9.5 Tom is quoting K~ngLearagain

10.1 Another King Lear quote. 11.1The notion of two Londons deals with percep lion on a metaphor~clevel, and also the b~narq theme again.

112 Wlnston Churchill 11874-1965)was prime minister of England during the second World War.

"Celebrity characters" I design the same way I would any other, using as much reference material as I can find.

Nlagara Falls is a massive North American waterfall. 12.1 Big Issueis a paper benefining the homeless.

Other locations I either make up or base on any reference material that is (or seems) similar - one cobblestone back street looks pretty much the same as any other!

123 First appearance of Lord Fanny. 1 3 2 UK to U F poofs = demgatov slang for homosexual males. 143 First appearance of Slr Miles Delacoun. The hunting clothes establishthe dehumanization of his enemies, a recurring theme throughout the first volume. The fact that they are hunting in broad daylight 1s probably the point - those in power can do what they wish.

SEAN PHILLIPS ON CREATING THE VOLUME I COVERS

How did you land the covers gig for Volume I?

15.3 "Linle vixen" has a double meaning here.

The then editor, Stuart Moore, called and asked me.

15.4 Blooding is a ritual in which a young hunter is initiated by smearmg the blood of his first kill on h ~ face. s Another initiation reference.

What guidance did you have from the editors or Grant?

162 Trains are a recurring image, suggesting the commoditization of people as per the Holocaust.

None that I can remember. I just read the scripts and came up with ideas for sketches. Hopefully Stuart or Grant selected the best one.

163The Undergroundis essentiallya modem cave system Caves are a place of great importance in initiations traditionally - K~ngMob's initiation in Issue 1.18 occurs in a natural cave. '"The road to Heaven runs through the depths of Hell." sums up the darkness into light theme that recurs throughout the series, exemplified by Fanny 16.5 The guardian is made from a cross and a television, referenc~ng the two main influencesof Western culture. 173 Luan-Dun is literally Celtic for "City of the Moon" Legend has it that a temple to Diana, Goddess of the Moon, once stood in the current locationof St. Paul's Cathedral. 18 The redlgreen circle is the cosmic stoplight. which governs access to the Invisible College in the '"healthy" Universe A.

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18.3 "Speeding up " Another recurring theme is that time is a fractal that is moving faster as the end date of December 12,2012 approaches 18.4-18.6 BARBELiTH likely derives from the Greek words barbaroslalienlforeignl and bthos(stonel 19.1 The airships signify entiy into a different London o r at least a differently perceived London The airships may be yet another cultural perception of BARBELiTH. along with the angelslalienslarchons Or this may be a "healthy" version of London from the Universe A intersection. as compared to the unhealthy Universe B version shown in 1.5.2 22 and 3 2

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How did you approach creating the covers?

After sketch approval, I took whatever photo reference I needed and then just did the painting. All the covers, with the exception of #25, which was pen and ink on colored paper, were painted with acrylics on board.

Note the green traffic light, tying to the cosmic stoplight.

Were you happy with the way the covers were ultimately presented?

19.3 Dane's scar is explained on 1 16 10 5 Rapid healing may be among his powers. as he appears to regrow his severed p~nkyas well as heal the scar

Yes, Rian Hughes did his usual great job on the logo.

20.1 The French Situationists believed that capitalism and technology created a condition in which humans did not perceive reality as it was, but instead perceived it as i t was shown to them via television, radio and computers etc As a result, most would stumble through life watching it as it was presented to them instead of experiencing it 20.3 Possibly the first appearance of a non, a subculture ultimately created by the Marquis de Sade that aspires toward genderlessness

20.4 The statue is based on en illustration from William Blake's Urizen, about a false god William Blake 11757-18271was an English artist and poet He is famous for his many engravings and poetry such as the The Book of Urizen and The Visions o f the Daughters o f Albion Blake rejected materialism in favor of imagination and was disturbed by the effects of industrialization on England. 20.5 Dreams as reality suggests that life may be fiction, a recurring theme

21.1 Dragon lines are also known as ley lines, believed to be routes of magical energy crossing Britain. Canary Wharf is Britain's tallest building Note that it's capped by a pyramid Buckingham Palace is the residence of the British monarch

22.1 The "dog sta? is Sirius The Dogon tribe of Africa believe that they were visited by the amphib~ousNommo aliens, who came from Sirius B The burial chambers in Egyptian pyramids point to Sirius 22.6 Child Roland to the Dark Tower Came is a poem by Robert Browning, which partially inspired Stephen King's Dark Tower series Childe Rowland is also an English folk tale in which Rowland rescues his sister and two brothers from the king of Elfland's Dark Tower UK poet Robert Browning 11812-18891is best known for The Ring and the Book US author Stephen K~ng(b 19471is the world's most popular and successful horror writer 24These fox hunters are actually the Invisibles. One common aspect of initiation is challenge by peers Note that both the Invisibles and the Conspiracy have appeared to Dane as fox hunters, touching on the theme that both sides are the same

PN: An intriguing follow up to the debut that continues to throw out references to the series' overarching themes in scattershot bursts, this issue comes off slightly the worsefor wear for the lack of character development. We get the first of several conspiracy theoriesfrom the first page, and the foray through the alternate London is interesting. Dane's homelessness is well dealt with for a mainstream comic book, with some lovely metaphoric illustrations by Steve Yeowell. And the introduction of (what we later learn are) the Invisibles is a n example of the power of subtlety. But the Shakespeare-mangling Tom O'Bedlam seems slightly out of place, a token of the early Vertigo style monopolized by Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN. Luckily for the character, he will be drawn more credibly in the following volume. As for Dane, without development we're still left with a n unlikeable protagonist; but his predicament is interesting and with Morrison dealing questions faster than answers the reader has no choice but to come back next month.. . KCS: As we rejoin young Master McGowan, we find him a bit worse for wear - gaunt, shaggy and plagued with explosive acne. Props to Steve Yeowell.for his stunning portrayal of Dane's decay. 7;be highlight of this issue: Mad Tom, Mad Tom and Mad Tom. His Shakespearean spouting but Grantpulls it off by not is a bit reminiscent of SANDMAN, taking himseK or Tom O'Bedlam, too seriously. 7;be humor also serves to offset what could easily have been tedious and preachy philosophical ramblings. Instead, the reader is treated to a tour of another London courtesy of the fabled blue mold. And we get a sneak peak of Dane'sfirst real contact with BARBELilH. Thefox hunt on the street is a bit over the top, but it sets up the scope of Dane's initiation rather nicely. And while Fanny's coloring is 08fear not, Daniel Vozzo will get it right sooner rather than later.

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'The world s sick, boy.

PART TWO


lery sick.

\ virus got

Grant MorrisonNOV Writer 94

n a long

Steve Yeowell Art Daniel Vozzo Colors

Electric Crayon Color Separations Clem Robins letters Julie Rottenberg Assistant Editor

:ime ago jnd we've jot so

Stuart Moore Editor Sean Phillips Cover

~sedto its ?ffects, we've 'orgotten

hat it Nas like before we became ill. I'm talking

Tom decides to up the ante following a magical tour of London by showing Dane the world from a pigeon's point of view. The pair have a ghostly encounter at St. Dunstan's-in-the-East before Tom assaults Dane on the banks of the Thames, trying to force him through trauma into enlightenment. Dane realizes that his knowledge of self has been programmed, is able to transcend this into a tabula rasa. Tom then decides to put Dane through one final test of faith - leaping from the top of Canary Wharf.

about cities, see?"


STUART MOORE ON THE WOK OF THE INVlSlBLES Who selected the individual artists, and Sean Phillips for the covers? Was the variant cover on issue five an editorial edict?

45 Tom is quoting King Lear Ill.vi 5.3 One of the Beatles wore a blank badge at a press conference in New York in 1968 to announce the formation of Apple Records. 6.1 'Summer is a'comin' in" is from The Cuckoo Song, a thirteenth centuty English lyric heralding the rebirth of spring 6 2 Note Boy's hair Is she attempting some poor disgu~seor just poorly colored? 6.4 "Time's going past" touches on the fluidity of time around Dane. 6.5 Cmm-Cmach was a god worshiped in Ireland prior to the Christian infiltration. His name means "bloody crescent" or "bloody bent one." hence Lord Word On Samhain, members of h ~ cult s to him in order to ensure a would make sacr~f~ces good harvest. Samhain IS a pagan holiday celebrated on 31 October. It is a time of reflect~onand of seeing. or divination Totem animals are spirit guides or protectors that lend guidance during life's journey Each individual is said to have his or her own totem animal.

7.3 Tom presumably smacks Dane to move his assemblage polnt The assemblage polnt, as described by Carlos Casteneda, determines the range of a person's perceptions. By moving our assemblage point, we can percelve aspects of reality otherwise hidden to us. Normally. our assemblage point is between our shoulder blades. Here, Tom may be preparing Dane for what IS to come on the follow~ngpages.

9.3 This IS St. Paul's cathedral. The bird seems able to percelve much more than the average human, perhaps because it is not subject to the programming that we are. The archon perched over St. Paul's is a metaphoric image reinforcing the notion of religion as an oppressive institut~on. 10.3 "Our world is sick." Disease is another recurring theme of THEINVISILES, especially in Volume 1 10.4-10.5 Note the overlapping panels, while Tom's volce 1s omnipresent. Another illustrat~onof the slngle time theme.

11.1Tom's talking about hyper-obsewat~on- magick. 112This may be the first appearance of the timesuit/f~ct~onsuit. 1 2 1 "Open your eyes" suggests that we are visually programmed rather than Independent thlnkers

Grant and I agreed on Sean early on. Most of the artists were his suggestion, a few were mine. Jill Thompson and Steve Yeowell were both planned to d o the book early on; Steve had collaborated with Grant several times before, and Jill had been talking with him about doing something - s o had John Ridgway. I know I suggested Tommy Lee Edwards for the one issue D.201, and I kind of brought Phil Jimenez into Grant's orbit. After Phil drew an issue of Mark Millar's SWNP THING,Grant wanted him on THEINVISIBLES. STEVE YEOWELL ON DRAWING THE INWSIBLES Do you prefer to draw conversational or action sequences (and what did you think of the overt violence in the scripts)?

I enjoy drawing both. I didn't have a problem with the overt violence in the scripts - although I was surprised at the lack of reaction (that I noticed anyway) to the exploding head shot in issue one: I actually went far beyond the panel description when I drew it. Which characters did you like to draw most? Least?Why?

I liked drawing Dane and King Mob the most, maybe because they were the major cast members I felt I'd contributed most to. Ragged Robin I liked the least at the time because of her corkscrew hair - and when I came back to her at the end of volume one I couldn't get out of drawing it! That and her being an alternate version of Crazy Jane from DOOM PATROL. who I also disliked. SEAN PHILLIPS ON HIS PERSONAL BEST Which covers are your favorite and least favorite, and why?

My favorite was #15. It was simple, graphic, bold and a little bit rude ... My least favorite was #17. It was just s o badly painted, truly awful. Rian almost saved it by adding a fractal background, though.

12 I-.e

ANARCHY FOR THE MA!i5E5

"Go back to seep" is the opposte of BARBELiTHS message, wh~churges us to think for ourselves.

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"Here endeth the lesson" is a traditional endina to Biblical lessons read in church.

13.1 "Cut the apron string< relates to the recurring theme of growing up 132 KAR 120C is the license plate of Number 6 from the UK telev~sionseries The Prisoner, a pol~trcalallegoryabout a man who refuses to expla~nwhy he resigned from a government job. Elements from The Prisonerfrequentlyrecur in THE INva~e~cs, most notably in Mrster Six. This is King Mob's car.

13.5 Life as fiction is a recurring theme

PN: Dane's initiation continues, onward through the realm of chaos magick and its attendant emphasis on expanded perception. As with much of the first volume, characterization remains negligible, with ideas taking center stage. Steve Yeowell movesfrom strength to strength in these early issues, dynamically tackling what might otherwise be a dull series of talking head segments. But the true star is Morrison himselL writing a rare stoy about magick itself rather than the usual nonsense about warlocks and fairies. 7i"Je mystery of the Invisibles remains strong after three issues (indeed, the reader has no reason to suppose the term refers to a team at all), and the metaphor of the blank page is u~orththe $3.95 cover price alone. KCS: Another juicy issue indeed. With a creepy hirdkeye view of St. Paul's, the secret of cities revealed and a mini session of Reichian therapy to crack Dane's armor, one is left wondering how on Earth Grant crams so much into one issue. The distinct lack of transition after the opening scene probably helps. When does the pigeon scene occur.? An hour, a day, a month after the opening scene? Hard to tell. Nonetheless, Tom continues Dane's education and Grant manages to make it entertaining and thought provoking. The blank page is a stunning revelation, and probably thefirst point in the series when Ifelt I was reading something more than the average Vertigo book.

15.1 Pan and Oionysus are the Greek gods of nature and pleasure, respectrvely. Her rnvocation of them suggests a hedonistrc l~festyle 152 Frrst young Edrth and Freddre See 2 10 15.3 Tom is quoting from King lear lll.vi. Note that Fredd~eknows the quote. Fratereno IS a demon. Nero was the emperor of Rome when it famously burned.

15.4 Trad~tronally,a Hand of Glory was a charm made by cuning off the hand of a murderer still hanging from the gallows. The hand was then pickled and drred, and sometimes drpped in wax. Candles were occasionally lit between the fingers Hands of Glory were often used by burglars and robbers for luck, and to fr~ghtenthe~rprey 16.1 Both the Brbleand MrltonS Paradise lost portray Mammon as a deity associated with wealth A sigil is a symbolrc representatron of desire used to rmplant said destre In the unconsciousmind where ~tcan become reality

16.4 ''We want you, we want you as a new recrurt" IS a quote from the Vrllage People song In the Navy 17.3 The obelrsk IS Cleopatra's Needle, an 1819 gift from Egyptians to the Br~tishthat now srts on the bank of the Thames river in London. It was originally built around 15008C. Note the Khephra hreroglyph on the left side. 19.3 A reference to Re~chrantherapy, a verslon of whrch Dane IS about to undergo. People as robots IS another INWSI~LES theme. evoking the sleeping through life theme. 'M2Tom is quoting King LearIVr. Obidicut, Hobbldidance. Mahu, Modo and Fllbbertig~bbetare demons

20.4 Tom may be talking about the supercontext 21.5 Part of the rebirth process is the destruction of the ego The blank badge seems to symbol~ze Dane's first step rn that process.

22 The blank page represents Dane's ego destruction and subsequent rebrrth: his head emptred of programming, he is now a blank slate.

23.4 "Fillrng you up with silver" hints at magic mirror.

23.6 Tom's words here are a loose paraphrase of Noel Coward's song Iflove Were All.

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"We're trying to

PART THREE


unfuck your DEC 94 head."

Grant Morrison Writer Steve Yeowell Art Daniel Vozzo Colors Clem Robins Letters Julie Rottenberg Assistant Editor Stuart Moore Editor Sean Phillips Cover

Dane rejects the Jack Frost name and the notion that his destiny is in any way not his own before agreeing, under the influence of the blue mold, to leap from Canary Wharf. The trauma induces contact with BARBELiTH, but true to his word Dane flees. BARBELiTH catches u p to Dane, who seems to know what it is. Later, a note from Tom leads him to the Invisibles, who press him to join. Uncertain, Dane leaves with them just moments before the enemy's soldiers find the hideout. Elsewhere, Tom O'Bedlam wanders deeper into the subway toward a green light.. .

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STEVE YEOWELL ON LEAVING THE IVISIBLES


3 2 The old fr~endis Edtth 4 2 Language definlng reality IS a recurrlng theme

Grant's original idea was to use different artists for different story arcs. Mine came to an end!

4.3 UK to US: crisps = chips. 5.2 In Carlos Casteneda's work, sorcerers are often referred to as warriors.

How do you feel other artists handled "your" characters? Which artists' visions of them did you prefer, and which do you feel missed the boat? For example, your versions of both Robin and Boy are quite different than the portrayals they eventually received.

5.5 Throwing the red fr~sbeemay be a visual rejection of BARBELiTH at this time. 8.5The aurlc interference is lhkely the result of the tower blocking the flow of energy along the ley line 9.1 "Just lhke a postcard" The background in this panel ~ s postcard a - the serles br~dg~ng "real~ry"

I was disappointed King Mob lost the Asian caste I'd tried to give him, but maybe it never came over in the drawing! It's fairer to say that my version of Robin was different from the portrayal she was supposed to receive.

9.4 Wak~ngup is a recurrlng theme. 10.1 In King Lear. Edgar (disguisedas Tom O'Bedlaml and Glouster lump from a hill to bring the latter out of h ~ smalaise - to "reawaken" h ~ m 12.1 Note that BARBELiTH appears after trauma. 17.1 Big Brother is the oppressive reglme In George Orwell's novel 1984

PN: The Jnal segment of Dane's initiation begins well enough, with him and Tom enjoying a respite before leaping from Canary ?VbarJ But his contact with BARBELi77-J is tmly bizarre, leaving the reader with questions the series hasn't provided a context to even frame. Ultimately, answers are a full year's worth of issues away. Dane's meeting of the Invisibles is nicely understated, and the quartet is visually intriguing if nothing else. All in all something of a damp squib on its own, but in the context of the full series it'.< really rather special. KCS: The opening scene is dazzling, with a glowing and energetic Dane, starkly contrasting the brooding youth we've come to know. 7%e scene on the train is priceless: "the Bible and a nice apple," those were the days. 7%eart and colors in the post-jump sequence are stunning, and Mad Tom's demise is poignant and dignified. I've only known himfor three issues, but I'll miss him just the same. King Mob is too cool for me at this point, and his casual dismissal of what Dane's been through leaves a bad taste in my mouth, even ifhis behavior ispart of Dane's initiation.

19.5 "It's a man's life in the lnv~sibleArmy" 1s a play on the former Br~tishArmy slogan h's a man's life a the modern army Note the reversal of expectations here - King Mob is standlng between two women and a transvestite 20.2 The blood is the work of Orlando 20.3 Rex Mundiis Lat~nfor "K~ngof the World." First appearanceof Orlando. who may be named after the Vtrginia Woolf (1882-1941)character from the 1928 novel of the same name. Both characters are marked by flu~dIdentity. 20.5 Conspiracy theorists link the CIA Monarch m~ndcontrol program wtth "sex clrcuses" 10 Oown~ngStreet IS the home of the English prlme mlnlster

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I1 I Edith'sb~rthday- big birthday cake and candles anda couple of cards, whatever. Maintain the birthday atmosphere

PN: Edith's death is quite moving, despite (or perhaps because oL3 advance warning. It's mre to see a character die of natuml causes in a comic book, and rarer still that it's allowed to occur with the dignitypresent here. Ifthere's a criticism to be made, it's that some of the other stoylines are slight enough to be irrelevant. Perhaps some judicious editing could have strengthened the Edith scenes by shuifling the other plots into surrounding issues. On a different note, the PenningtodTarquin identity debacle has already reached epic propoflions (instigated apparently by a n unwitting artist and a 1es.s-than-attentitle editor), to the degree that Grant himself will ultimately have to comment in the series itself in a.few issues' time. KCS: n i s ts such a touching issue. King Mob hus become something new to me. His tenderness during Edith's last d q s is refreshing and smes to counteract all qf the bad.fielings I've had about him, especially during Volume 2. I always wanted him to become something more than an as.sassin. It seems his time in the mountains listening to cricket.^ screw had a good eflect on him. Edith :s death has the proper amount qf dignity. A relief; almost. Heka is a fascinating charactel; and I'd usually say that introducing neulpeople at this late stage i s a mistakq but Heka is apne addition. I was disappointed that Mister Six doesn 't appear. The cover made me think he might show up somewhere this issue.My mbtake.

CAP . Varanasi, India. EDITH . The key to i t all was Billy Chang, in the end. EDITH. It's all in my memoir; scandalafter scandal. 13.2 From the scrlpt: Circle in as King Mob pours Edith a glass of champagne She has a tiny porf~on on her plate but there's still a sense of abundance with tons of Ind~anThali stuff on the table Like the Indian down the road but classy Edith raises her hand Dope smoke drlfts languidly[offl course EDITH: There was some beastly business in 1924 when he was lockedaway for a year rn Wonnwood Scrubs EDITH They deported him in the end. from Albert Docks... EDITH: Enough1Enough1 The dialogue In t h ~ spanel is corrected in the The Invisible Kingdom trade paperback 13.3 From the script: King Mobpoursaglass for h~mseClooking at lt Ed~thtakes a sniff of her glass. EDITH Ihaven't had a drink since 19 69, EDITH Now Billy Of course we tended to romanticw the Chinese in those days, they

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1992

1992

Hilde Morales joins the lnvisibles as Lord Fanny

SEP King Mob and J o h n - A Dreams find the timesuit

SEP King Mob travels to Africa

ANARCHY FOR ME MASSES

seemed so decadent and deep burBilly was a very strange and remarkable man KING MOB And? 13.4 From the script. KMlooks up, fork in hand Ambience of ragas and s~tars. EDITH He vanished in the end, you see. There were rumors that h e u died deaf. blind andpenniless but EDITH: That wasn't i t at all KING MOB Maybe l l l u s t read rt KING MOB Why does this b~fihdayhave a Last Supper ambience? The Last Supperlc.1495)IS a painting by Leonardo DaVinci 11452-1519) illustrating Jesus' final meal wtth h ~ sdisciples before being crucified by the Romans. The d~alogueIn thts panel 1s corrected In the The Innsrble Kingdom trade paperback 14.1 For Edith's mlscarrlage see 3.1 14 4 142 Fortnum & Mason is an upscale British department store 15.3 Mllton H Erickson 11901-1980).w~delyv~ewed as the leading hypnotheraplstof h ~ stlme, pioneered a system of hypnosis marked by the importance of recasting sltuatlons through a new lens Neuro-linguisticprogramming,developed in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. 1s slmllar to Erlckson~antherapy In that it focuses on transformat~onalgrammar and a the Influenceof semantics.

15.5 Same spectes of spider are character~zedby the female eatlng the male after procreation. 16.4 "There was no cremation Only you saw it." The cremation seen throughout the serles IS Edith's. attended alone by K~ngMob. But other characters see r a t d~fferenttlmes because all times are one. 16.5 In some ways, the entlre serles is about rebirth. See "And so we return and beg~naga~n" on 1 1 1 and the multiple rebirths this issue IRoss~terreborn as an invertebrate. the return of Orlando In a new form) 192 As he did on 2 8 13 3. 19.5The "funny songs'' were sung on 2.10 17 2 20.3-20.5 Add~t~onal scenes from the sequences shownin1.315and2107 21.3 The crack is Edith's pulse, eventually flatlining in the direction of Shiva.

SEAN PHILLIPS ON ILLUWRATING ACTION VS SOAP OPERA

I prefer drawing people standing around talking. It's more of a challenge to keep the pages interesting. I

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The lnvisibles remind Jeremy Sutton to kill the Moonchild

King Mob has contact with BARBELiTH inside Ayer's Rock

FALL King Mob kills Joni

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"The 'paint' is wet on

KARMAGEDDON

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everything if you JAN 00

squint hard

Grant Morrison Writer Sean Phillips Pencils

enough."

Jay Stephens Inks Daniel Vozzo Colors and Separations Todd Klein Letters Shelly Roeberg Editor Brian Bolland Cover

Dane and Jolly Roger infiltrate the Porton Down weapons research center in plain sight to sabotage a secret facility for growing Ciphermen. Elsewhere, Helga lets Sir Miles go free, gambling that his prolonged absence and Key 23 injection will sabotage his place in the enemy's hierarchy. In the disused Underground station where Dane was initiated, Mister Six agrees to accompany the King in Yellow, whose dwarf assistants are making strange hand gestures. Mister Six mimics the movements with a piece of paper, which folds into an origami model of the timesuit. The King in Yellow reveals itself to be the Harlequinade, which informs Mister Six that he has moved outside of his role in the game and must be repositioned. In Varanasi, King Mob reminisces about Edith before gathering her driver and Thierro and heading for London for the penultimate showdown.. .

n I


%

SEAN PHILLIPS ON ILLUqRATING REAL LOCATIONS

With locations such as Varanasi I think it very important to get some accuracy. Atmosphere is more important than detail. Careful selection of what to put in is better than cramming in loads of buildings, people, vehicles, etc.

PN: It's interesting to see just how far I ~ IWSIBLES E has come to thkpoint, as aspects of the series across three volumes begin to coalesce. The idea that the British government is creating the Ciphermen seems a bit of a let down with the rise of The X Files in the intervening years since their introduction. But Tom's ghost visiting Edith before she dies is a lovely moment. So too is the original meeting between Edith and King Mob, previously described and finally shown as a coda for her stoy. Helga's release of Sir Miles demonstrates how far the Invisibles themselves have come (hands in the air whoever thinks the Invisibles of Volume 1 wouldn't have just shot him and been done with it). The fate of Mister Six here is an appropriately Prisoneresque blend of tantalizing clue and existential mystey.

1.1 King Mob's referring to the cheap anlmatlon techn~queof Scooby Doo, wh~chlooped backgrounds during motion sequences to save expense 1 2 Lots of threes and twos here - 23 This panel was first seen in 3.8.1 1, but with a plant. 1.3 A thought thtnking Itself is German philosopher Georg Hegel's (1770-1831)descript~onof God 2.1 Another Macintosh, or Apple 3.1 Kali 1s a female person~f~cat~on of the f~erce H~ndugod, representing power over time Note the KALl acronyms throughout this Issue

3.2 Saddleworth Moor, near Manchester. England. IS where the so-called Moors Murders took place.

KCS: Miles free, Six gone underground, Edith dead, Dane and Roger in suits. What is the world coming to? What is astonishing about this volume is how consistent things have remained. Even shifting between the two artists, a certain feel of calm inevitability has run through the past

3.3 Cruel Br~tanniais a pun on Tony Blair's "Cool Brittan~a"pol~t~cal motto Lila 1s a Sanskr~tterm for "d~vtneplay" In othet words, the gods play games with mortals

3.4 The Balkans are the collecttve countries separating the former Soviet Union from Eastern Europe. See 1 10 for more on the Voodoo sp~der-queen

3.5 "F~vetrlps was three too many'' Three and two are 23. they also add up to ftve. 4.2 Dane and Roger are mtm~ck~ng the Men In Black. an American urban legend about dark-suited federal agents lnvolved In conspiracies. Sllver nltrate on the Ilp combats an autopsy's stench

4.3 Note that instead of a card. Dane is holding e mirror: the staffer IS seelng what he wants to see 5.1 Is Jack using telekinesis to destroy the camera? 5.4 Slmply Red IS a UK sotl rock band. 62 "Here we go round the mulberly bush" IS from the children's song Pop Goes the Weasel See 3.1 17.1 for the song's climax. Orlando plays Pop Goes the Weasel tn Arcadra

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6.5 The Matrixis a 1998 film that "borrows" many core concepts and moments from THEIWISIBLES The Andy Ib 19671and Larly Wachowsk~(b 1965) film is about a false reality indistinguishable from ours.

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1994

1995

1995 T

SEP King Mob joins Elfayed in Cairo

SPRING King Mob travels to India and Africa

Tom O'Bedlam dies

9.4 The M~dwichCuckoos is a 1957 novel by UK author John Wyndham 11903-1969)about a race of malevolent alten children birthed In unlson by the unsuspecting women of a sleepy English town. C


Cuckoos leaves their eggs in the nests of other birds. 10.4 Patricia Campbell Hearst (b.1954) was kidnapped by the SymbioneseLiberation Army in 1974 and famously arrested for aid~ngher captors in 1975. 11.1 Last seen on 1.21.15 2. 112 Note the blue mold from 1.2 17. CrowleyS statement is an inversion of "nothing 1s true, everything is permitted." an occult phrase originatingwith mystic Hassan i Sabbah 11.3 In gnostic theory, hyltc refers to the material. as opposed to the spiritual.

eight issues. Last volume I was always fretting: How will they get out of this? Is Boy working for the other side? Is Mason? But there is nofretting now.Justpassive enjoyment. It's almost like television. Odd, that. Really dug Sean Phillz@son this run and I'm sad to see him go. But onward, to the end!

11.4 Initiation is a recurring theme. 11.5 Health and Effciencyis a UK nudist magazine. 12.1 UK to US, dodgems = bumper cars 12.3 A mobius strip is a ribbon Misted so that it only has one side, whlch continues for eternlty 125 Note that Mister Six's smoke rings are forming the map of reality1 14.1 Note Tom O'Bedlam's corpse, it's not decomposing after four years! 14.2 Life as a game is a recurrlng theme 15.1 The Naz~sused the Bergen-Belsentransit center as a concentration camp On Apr~l20, 1999, two students of Columbtne High School in Linleton. Colorado. killed 13 other students and faculty before comm~ningsu~c~de The Khmer Rouge communist fact~on,led by Pol Pot Ib.Solath Sar. 1925-19981,weflhrew the Cambodian government in 1975. k~lling2 mlll~onpeople 154 The fetus in space is an image from the Stanley Kubrick film ZWI. A Space OMsey 16.1 "Edward and Sophie" are Prince Edward Ib.1964) and his wlfe, Soph~eRhysJones (b.19651. "Posh and Beckham" are former Spice G~rlVictoria Adams Ib 19741and her husband, Manchester United football star David Beckham (b.1975). 16.4 From Shakespeare's Dng Lear, Ill, w 172 L~feas a game: a recurrlng theme. Monopoly is a board game in which players take on the role of cap~taliststrying to bankrupt others. 17.5 More numerals relating to 23 182 Osiris is the Egyptian god of the underworld and vegetation, frequently symbolizing rebirth 19.1 UK to US. Cluedo = Clue. a board game in wh~chplayers try to solve a murder 20.1 Hatfulof Hollow is the Smiths' second album. 21.1 "Is it the Holy Grail or two faces talking?" See the cover to 3 2 Also, language as real~ty

aris will be destroyed on August 11, 199 es King Mob know of this prophesy a ke a joke of it to Edith in 1995?

21.3 See 1.1.6.2 for the Paris prophecy 21.4 "The lnvisibles ride again" IS a play on the Max Brand Ib.Freder~ckSchiller Faust, 1893-1944)novel Destry Hides Again, about a reluctant cowboy hero. Why does Ktng Mob bring Th~erroand the drtver t i they don't participate on the Westminster Abbey attack? And where's P u ~ e sduring the attack? 22.1 "No sleep till 2012" is a play on the Beastte Boys' song No Sleep Till Brooklyn 22.4 More 23.

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1995

1995

MAR 18 Aum Supreme Truth attacks Japan subway with sarin

SUMMER Dane McGowan joins the lnvisibles as Jack Frost

Division X reactivated; Moonchild eats Jeremy Sutton

P

"'The

THE INVISIBLE KINGDOM

Invisibles'

PLANET

is an immune MAR 00 Grant Morrison Writer Steve Yeowell Art 1,2,5,6,11,12,15

program: Triggered

Ashley Wood Art3,4 Philip Bond Art8,9,20

by the

Jill Thompson Art 10, 16-19 Steve Parkhouse Art 13,14 John Ridgway Art 7,21,22

BARBELiTH buoy when

Daniel Vozzo Colors and Separations Todd Klein Letters

the game

Shelly Roeberg Editor Brian Bolland Cover

crashed and embedded the player."

Mister Six accesses the supercontext before rotating back into place in 1999, where he reveals that the Harlequinade are the secret head of the Invisibles. The Invisibles prepare for the final battle in their own ways, Fanny returning to the depths of her youth in an effort to weave a glamour around London on their behalf. In Westminster Abbey, Sir Miles prepares for the coronation of the Moonchild and the descent of the Archons, who have sent a replacement for Miss Dwyer in the form of John-A-Dreams. As parishioners arrive for the coronation, King Mob, hidden in the rafters, summons the Invisibles to action. On December 22, 2012, Dane continues telling the story to Gaz, having worked his way through events up to the final raid on Westminster Abbey. Elsewhere, the Invisibles fight off an Archon attack as Robin activates the timesuit.. .


GRANT MORRISON ON THE ARTIFS JAM ISSUES Does the confluence of artists in these final issues adequately convey your original intent? Many fans found them confusing or unsatisfying.

1.3 Mount Vesuvlus IS a volcano that most famously erupted in 79A0, burying the Greek C of Pompell.

I ~

Note that Mister Six stands as Oppenhelmer d ~ d on 2.2.2.2 and King Mob on 2 6 21.5.

1.4 Like Klng Mob on 2.6.21.5 Mister SIX appears to be manipulating reality; bridging the interface between the real and flct~onaluniverses 2 1 Ontology 1s a strain of metaphysics deallng with the nature of existence Ontological shock in this case probably refers to an overload of informatlon about the essence of be~ng Note the snowflake effect, previously seen in issue 1.7 and later in issue 3.1

2.6 Christmas IS actually on a Tuesday in 2012.

The last three but one were all jams. Initially the idea was to do that, because I wanted everyone who'd ever worked on the series to come back and do a bit. At the end the structure of it, which is a reiterating spiral, I didn't get mad because I'd crammed too much in it - that's the point. The spiral gets tighter and tighter, so the same gestures are repeating themselves faster and faster and the plot sort of starts to disintegrate. But it's all there. Everything's still there, it just gets smaller and smaller into a point. The first one I thought was brilliant. It really, really worked, because it starts off and Ashley redid the action bit [originally seen in the future segments of 2.61, and the Philip Bond stuff. Everyone's work really meshed well. It was just a really great comic. And then the second one I didn't think worked as well, and the third one just seemed to be a bit of a disaster. JILL THOMPSON ON RETURNING TO THE INVISIBLE5

This scene continues from 1.23.1

3 This scene 1s a continuation of 2 6.16

3.7 The lnvlslble cell of 2012 has mastered the 64letter alphabet.

How did you land the assignment?

They approached me.

A memeplex is a collect~onof memes, or ideas

42 Life as a game is a recurring theme. 5 The building is the seat of UK power, the Houses of Parliament. Note the poster from 3 10 21 4 and Fanny taklng Mason's role from 2.16 22.

6.2 Note that the flag is in reverse colors. a la King Mob's shirt in the second half of Volume 2. the cover to 2 17 and the flag on 3 9.22 7.1 The symbol on the flag was originally a swastika. censored by Vertigo for flnal publ~cation 7 2 The return of John-A-Dreams, and the f~rst time he appears contemporaneousto the story 73 Sabaorh is the Hebrew plural form for "host" or "army" In the Catholic belief system, 11generally refers to angels. 7.4 Guy's Hospital IS a real UK hospital. located near London Bridge It was founded by Sir Thomas Guy Id 1724). opening In 1726 after his death 8.2 For those wondering how an image of a tollet wound up in an illuminated manuscript, it's obvious from the scissors and glue that Helga is creatlng her own verslon of the text. Thls of course is another Instance of the ~nterplaybemeen flction and reality, and the magical abiltty to write one's

Your return to the series veers from your earlier work toward your newer, more signature lines.

Yeah, I was in the midst of working on SCARY GODMOTHE when I got that, and because it was just a few pages it was hard to consciously switch back to something else. Grant had mentioned that he really liked that style a lot, and he that way. wished that I could d o THEINVISIBLES

It was weird, because when I'm drawing SCARYGODMOTHER none of them are real people to me, so it's easy to draw Max the vampire with the big long neck and the billowy, skinny body, but ybu throw a bunch of piercings on him and he'd I

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1996

1996

OCT The lnvisibles leave for the US after battle at the House of Fun

FALL The lnvisibles regroup in New York; Robin new leader

Kay takes photo of fractal cloud formation in New Mexico


3 own lhfe scrlpt Both sides being the same is a recuning theme. The "crinkly edges of complexity" are fractals, the edges of which contain the larger pattern within them and therefore appear "cr~nkly"

probably make a really good King Mob. But I'd have a hard time drawing King Mob without more realistic features, so I did add some of that back.

9.1 Winnie the Pooh IS Chr~stopherRob~n'sstuffed bear in AA M~lne's11882-1956)books, which were subsequently filmed as animated features and shorts by the Walt O~sneycompany.

Which scenes do you enjoy approaching as an artist?

IKung! is the language of the Kalahari bushmen of Afr~ceThe ! represents a click of the tongue, as when mak~ngt~ck-tocksounds

I have to say I like conversational scenes. There's a certain kind of action I like better, but it's not my strongest point. I have to say my action in SCARY GODMOTHER is much more active than the action in THEINVISIBLES was.

9.5 In lhe tarot. The Lovers signify love and sexuality. specificallya bridging of the distance between male and female. Whlch. ~fthe cover of 3.2 is cons~dered,IS the key to an understanding of the universe. 10.1 UK to US: In the UK, A levels and 0 levels are tests s~gnlfynga level of academ~cach~evement.

Some of my favorite scenes are things that most people would consider boring. If a writer wrote something where in a different instance you may just get six panels of peoples' heads talking, I'm trying to move the camera around, trying to make it more interesting. Even though we're staying in the same room, try and use different angles. Make sure expression comes through in peoples' faces. That's one of the things I really pride myself on, really subtle moments. I love to make sure that I can tell the story without people having to read the captions.

The text here seems to Imply more how Fanny sees herself, rather than an actual caption (she's really 27 at th~spolnt) or personal ad (unless she advertised her services to a ~ dthe magick). Th~s page has been the subject of much debate in fandom, but ~t.?obvious from the following page that Fanny is weaving a magick glamour around London to a ~ the d Invis~bles'lmpendlng assault on Westminster Abbey

11.1 Glamour has two meanlngs - beauty, or a mag~ckspell or charm. Fanny would think she's been spreading both! 11.2 UK to US. A maisonette is a small apartment that generally has a separate entrance to the main building.

PHILIP BOND ON COORDINATING THE ARTIST'S JAM

13.2 Note the black hel~copters.

How did your relationship with Shelly affect the work [Philip and INVISIBLES' editor Shelly Roeberg are married]?

13.3 Thelemltes are followers of Ale~sterCrowley. 13.4 Slrange Bedfellows and ~ t ssequel are (probably fictional) porn films

Actually I don't think it made much difference. I've always had a good relationship with Shelly as an editor, that just

14.1 Automaker Ford Motors manufactured the Cortina family sedan In the UK beginn~ngIn 1962, continuing through the early 1970s 14, Compos mentis 1s Latin for "of sound mind." 152 Compare with 3 6 20 5 172 The Kn~ghtsof the Round Table helped King Arthur on his various quests in the English myths 17.4 OnwardChristianSoldiers IS a Christian hymn 18.4 "All for one and one for all" is the mono of the three musketeers In Alexandre Dumas' (b. Dumas Davyde la Pailleterie. 1802-18701 1844 novel The Three Musketeers 18.5 Thls image IS a parody of the three musketeers' action when saylng ''all for one and one for all." They use swords, however 192 11 1s significant number in the Crowley system of magick.

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1997

I998

I998 T

Takashi Satoh discovers the key to time travel

MAY Satan arrives in Dulce

King Mob and Ragged Robin arrive in Philadelphia

d c

Ouatermass is the blanket name for a serles of BBC sclence f~ct~on ser~alsbroadcast In the 1950s. subsequently remade as films by the Hammer studio. The ser~alsdetailed the adventures of Rocket Group as he Bernard Ouatermass of Br~t~sh dealt wlth various allen invasions Written by Nigel Kneale (b.1923). the three hugely Influential ser~alsdebuted w11h19535 The Ouatermass Experiment,


w W

t22.1 A byblow is a child barn out of wedlock.

2 5

went a step further. I don't get any special treatment or attention, so if it works it's no thanks to her. On reflection, how do you feel the artist's jam issues worked? Why did you only contribute to one of the three?

As an artist I'm bound to find these jams interesting, but it works with what Grant's doing - it's not so much the storytelling, but the showcase of language and images that I find exciting. As far as my meager contribution, it was a matter of timing, I was already late on a HELLBLAZER story [the HELLBLAZER: BADBLOODlimited series] so I couldn't d o more. It's a privilege to be thought worthy enough to be squeezed in, though. SI'EVE YEOWELL ON RETURNING TO THE INVlSlBLES

What was it like to return with so much water under the bridge?

Pretty much the same as it had been returning at the end of Volume 1.

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I998

-r

JUN Takashi gives timesuit's liquid hard drive to US government

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I998

JUN 1 Jack Frost, Lord Fanny and Boy arrive in Philadelphia

JUN 4 Boy quits the lnvisibles

Had you followed the series in the interim? I read most of the first volume, parts of the second and the occasional issue of the third.

PN: THEINVISIBLES shiftS into its climax in slow gear, and it's surprisingly appropriate. mere's a nostalgic ambience to thefinal supper before the battle, and though the gang has been slowly losing members across the past year it's still touching to think we'll never see them again. Seeing the preparations for the coronation introduces a lovely mundanity to the villains which somehow brings the otherworldly menace down to Earth, and the low-key appearance of John-A-Dreams after all this time is a nice touch. m e scattered artwork also works well in this issue, nicely illustrating the quantum psychology theme of the series. A pity it would imminently degenerate into an incomprehensible mess. KC5: After Karmageddon, it's hard to believe that Grant could come up with something better, but he does. First ofi the artistic scheme works wonders for the script, condensing the entire series in its final episodes, the whole contained within the smallest unit. It's rather genius and a damn shame it doesn't work in the next two issues. m e images of Dane holding Gaz in the streets are tender. Dane is heroic and vulnerable, spending armageddon comforting (and finding comfort with) his old friend, recapitulating and waiting. m e sudden appearance ofJohn-A-Dreams is almost startling, even if half-expected, and with him comes the promise of many things explained. One gets the sense that loose ends are to be tied in the coming issues, as Grant begins to spell out the answers to the series' many questions. m e final image of KM in his mask looking quite like the bastard mirror monster was a perfect sum-up of the issue, and the point Grant has been hammering home since the beginning: We are all the same thing.

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I998

I998

JUL The Invisibles' second Dulce infiltration

JUL Timesuit confiscated by US government

JUL Ragged Robin activates new timesuit; travels to supercontext

Iw

POI

m

w

lu t-

n

9 u "You just gotta make


friends with

GOODBYERAG

'em. Make APR 00 friends with

Grant Morrison Writer Steve Yeowell Art 1,2,4

them until they beg for mercy."

Rian Hughes Art3 John Ridgway Art5-9 Paul Johnson Art 10 Michael Lark Art 11,12 Jill Thompson Art 13-17 Chris Weston Art 18-22 Daniel Vozzo Colors and Separations Todd Klein Letters Will Dennis Assistant Editor Shelly Roeberg Editor Brian Bolland Cover

The evening before the attack on Westminster Abbey, Dane and King Mob burn the time machine windmill. The next day, with everyone in position, Division X interrupt the coronation of the Moonchild and brandish the Hand of Glory. Crowley is cut down by Orlando, and Sir Miles orders the slaughter of the Abbey. Orlando kills Jack Flint, but not before he explains to Harper that they are all players experiencing the game in fictionsuits. Sir Miles discovers that the Ciphermen tanks have been sabotaged and he is without backup. He orders the coronation of the Moonchild as King Mob, Fanny and Jolly Roger emerge from hiding in a captive lot of homeless people. Fanny attacks Orlando as Roger is grabbed by an Archon. A stunned King Mob is taken aback to find Sir Miles training a gun on him.. . After the attack, a critically wounded King Mob calls Jaqui in a delirious ramble.

CHRIS WESI'ON ON RETURNING TO THE lNVI5IBLES

Despite your work experience on the second volume, you returned to the series for the final storyline. Were they just casting a net for all the people who'd worked on the series previously?

Yeah, that's pretty much it. It's sort of like when the reunion comes, in the encore they wheel out everyone who had been involved in the production. How did they coordinate the production?

God knows! I really don't know. I just got the script for my pages, plus the artwork of the artists who were on either side of me. What did you think of the end result?

I don't think it worked at all. It was terrible. I thought it was only going to be for one issue, but they did it for like three. I think one would have been enough. If anything killed THE INVISIBLES in sales, it's the fact they had so many different artists on it. I think the final issues just compounded that, really. It just looked a mess. Ooh, I'm being a bit controversial, aren't I? The blind chessman...

Was he John-A-Dreams? I didn't quite understand that, in the final few ones. This is the confusion caused by too

2.1 Raudive EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) record~ngsare tapes of the ambient noise in haunted houses When played at a h~ghvolume. strange volces are supposedlyaudible. Konstantin Raudive (d.1974). a student of Carl Jung 1187519611, was a Lalvian psychologist who expanded on earlier efforts to capture spirlts on tape, eventually amassing a collection of more than 1W.WO recordings. He wrote several books on the subject. beginning with the 1968 text The Imudible Becomes Audible. BT 1s UK telephone operator British Telecom

23 See 2 5.14 2 25 Rag. Tag and Bobtail are three puppet anlmals featured on the BBC ch~ldren'stelevision series Watch W~thMother(1952-19801,the first series to specifically target preschool children 3 A rag is a piece of music played In ragtime, a style of jazz notable for a syncopated rhythm in the melody, generally played on plano The t~tlealso plays off the end of the Rag. Tag and Bobtail ep~sodesof Watch With Mother, s~gn~fying a nostalgic return to early childhood, suggestive of the personalityregression experienced by Jack Fl~ntand the wounded King Mob. 52 The song is a slight misquote of the flnal verse of the Christian hymn 0 Worship the King. wrinen in 1833 by Robert Grant (1779-18381to accompany muslc by Johann Michael Haydn 11737-18061. It should read: "0 tell of His might, 0 sing of His grace, whose robe is the light, whose canopy is space "

5.5 The conscious mind can hold only seven things, accord~ngto folk wisdom 7 2 A clip from the recordings last seen on 3.12.16.5. 9.1 Where do all these people go?

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JAN King Mob ponders lnvisibles TV in India

JAN 28 Division X follows Miles Delacourt on surveillance

MAY Edith Manning visits La Coste

10.1 "This 1s lust a su~tfor experiencing 'The Inv~sibles."'Life as fiction/game, a recurring theme Note Klng Mob and Fanny In the foreground, in their homeless disguises [although on 16.5 King Mob is wearing his headdress) Flint is a fiction suit, worn by John-A-Dreams. K~ng Mob IS a f~ctionsu~tworn by Grant Morrison.

102 Tom Hanks 1b.1956) is an American actor best known for f~lmssuch as 1994's Forrest Gumo in which a man accidentally blunders into meetings with several historical figures.


Lyndon Baines Johnson 11908-19741, generally known as LkJ, was president of the United States between 1963 and 1968 following the assassination of JFK Life as a film is a recurring theme. Note Stuan Sutcliffe and John Lennon walking past the phone booth, a la issue 1 1

10.3 The Tripping Darlings is a term used by Scottish minister Roben Kirk in The Secret Commonwealth(c 16901, a text on Gaelic folklore, referr~ngto the faerie and the anclent propensity for referring to potentially dangerous beings bq kindly names. The Good People IS another traditional name for the faerie.

10.3-10.4 The Harlequlnade stroll past the phone booth. 10.5 "She was a glrl from Birmingham" is from Bodies. a song by the Sex P~stolson their 1977 album Never Mind the BoNocks. The next line is. "She just had an abortion,'' perhaps a reference to the Moonchild or Quimper 13.3 "The lord's my chauffeur" 611Keane lb.19221, in his Famrly Circuslfrom 1960) newspaper comic strip. featured an eplsode in which one of the children returns from Sunday school and says. "Know what we learned in B~bleclass? The Lord is my chauffeur. I shall not walk" The actual line is. '"The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want." 13.4 Gordonstoun,founded in 1934, is a public [private)school located in north Scotland. 20.5 Stephen Hawking 1b.1942) is widely believed to be the world's foremost theoretical physicist in the fields of general relativity and black holes The British scientist is best known for his 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which descr~besthe nature of the universe In layman's terms Note that Helga carriers her cut-and-paste grimolre from 3.4.8.

21.1 Lara Croft IS the hero~neof the Tomb Rarder video games series and the 2001 Simon West (b 1961) film Lara Croh Tomb Rarder. 21.4 "The king IS dead, long live the king" is an English phrase of royal succession; each heir to the throne becomes k~ngat the moment of the previous king's death 221 At some point after 3.3 17 IKlng Mob found the time to put on a shirt, apparently

many artists on the final book. Too many cooks spoil the broth. This is where it suffers - you look and think, He looks a bit like John-A-Dreams there. Maybe that was deliberate - maybe Grant wrote: Make him look a bit like John-A-Dreams. It was quite hard to follow toward the end, I think. There were little things that annoyed me, like their clothes would change from page to page. 1 mean, they should have sat down and drawn a style guide and sent that out to all the artists. You know: He is wearing this, this and this. When I got my pages, I could take my pick of what I wanted them wearing, really. An interesting experiment. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to d o the best pages in it. That's why I did mine as a big double-page spread. I was definitely thinking, I'll blow the others away! I think John Ridgway ended up the man of the match, to be honest. JILL THOMPSON ON CHAOS BEHIND THE SCENES How did they handle continuity for that final storyline?

[Laughs.] They didn't. I was just given the pages I was supposed to draw, and I said, "Please send me some reference of what has gone before so I put these people in the correct position, or they're in the same building, for God's sake." Luckily a couple of my pages were just stand-alone pages where Fanny was out. No one else had to draw those series of scenes where she was before, because she was just here, there and everywhere. One of them I fell back to one of the first scenes I drew for all of TIIEINVISIRLES - I think that's why I was chosen for that, when all the Invisibles are out. It's a scene that comes right before or right after when Jack wants to drink champagne.

...and a few panels went back to the Sheman arc. Yeah, with all the mirror stuff that comes out of Fanny. Do you think the jam was a successful experiment? I thought it was okay. I don't know. I

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1999

I999

MAY King Mob reunites with Mason Lang in India

MAY Mister Six asked to join the King in Yellow

I

1999 MAY Satellites begin to probe BARBELiTH


STEVE YEOWELL ON COORDINATING THE FINAL qORYLINE What sort of editorial coordination was there to handle the variety of artists? I was sent the script for the entire issue that I would be contributing to, photocopies of those pages that had already been turned in (pencils if the pages hadn't yet been inked), and either photocopies or published copies of the three or four issues leading up to mine.

I faxed half-size breakdowns for approval by Shelly Roeberg. After any requested changes had been made and approved, I enlarged the breakdowns on a photocopier, light-boxed them over to DC board and completed the pencils. After the finished pencils were okayed, I inked them up. What do you think of the jam effort on this storyline in hindsight?

As a reader I prefer to see an artist on a book for longer than the short runs that were used in the first volume, so speaking personally, I didn't find the "artist's jam" issues very satisfying.

PN: A haunting issue troubled by a n ill-advised mishmash of artists who are clearly the worse for wear for not having a strong editorial hand ensuring internal consistency or even that artists are assigned appropriate sequences. (Why in the world would you kill offlong-running characters under a n artist with a n expressionistic style associated neither with the characters nor the series? Any emotional impact is reduced to virtually nil.) Astonishing@, the worst is yet to come in this regard. John-A-Dreams frustrates, coming across as a n Outer Church cipher rather than the man with a burning story to tell we expect him to be. But the Jacqui sequences resonate, and the cameos toward the end are nice. The splash page by Rian Hughes is wonderful, and special marks to Chris Westonfor the great image of the Archons descending. I

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Edith Manning dies in India

AUG 10 King Mob burns the time machine windmill

AUG 11 The lnvisibles hold a last supper during solar ecliose

KCS: Goodbye Rag isn't quite the follow-up I'd hoped for, but it has its high points. Ridgway's dark and d r e a y rendering of the church fits the mood quite nicely.John-ADreams makes the perfect foil to the fearful Sir Miles. He still dreads "modification," and there is John beside him, the product of it, robotic and terrible. It's a fabulous combination. 7;beirdialogue on page seven is chilling and I felt a horriblepang for-rohn, who seems at this point in the story to be hom'bly lost. i'he other high point is Jill 7;bompson's art. Fanny bursting out of her disguise, spewing magic mirror on page 17 is a gorgeous image, as is the last panel on the same page. Jill Tbompson has always had Fanny dead on. Equal praisegoes to Chris Westonfor the remarkablepage 18; the .fourArchons are vaguely reminiscent of de Sade's libertines in 120 Days of Sod All. I guess the biaest let down is that not much actually happens. Sure, the Archons arrive and the Invisibles burstforth in all theirgloy, but I was impatient for the actual showdown, and resented having to wait another month. Damn monthlies!

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AUG 12 The lnvisibles prevent the coronation of the Moonchild

King Mob builds POP! gun

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"God bless you, Audrey


THE MOMENT OF THE BLITZ

Murray. I hope you

Grant Morrison Writer, Pencils22 May 00

inherit

Steve Yeowell Art 1 The Pander Bros. Art2,3,6,7 John Ridgway Art 4,5,10,11,15-17 Cameron Stewart Art 8,9 Inks 22 Ashley Wood Art 12-14 Mark Buckingham Art 18,19 Dean Ormston Art20,21 Daniel Vozzo Colors Digital Chameleon Color Separations Todd Klein Letters Shelly Roeberg Editor Brian Bolland Cover

As chaos erupts in Westminster Abbey, Sir Miles shoots the Moonchild and then Jolly Roger, but not before the latter manages to zap him with a dart tipped with Key 23. A trap preset by the Invisibles spills hundreds of words across the Abbey floor, trapping Sir Miles. Fanny banishes Orlando back to Mictlan, and John-A-Dreams reveals that he had re-entered reality in a fictionsuit as Jack Flint. The magic mirror, he explains, is liquid space-time. Helga and Mister Six give Sir Miles a rope, with which he hangs himself.

the Earth."

ANARCHY FOR THE MA558

1.1 Dane is narrating; he's telling the story to Gaz during the f~nalmoments In 2012 1.3 Note Sir Miles' revolver. By page four. it's become an automatic 2 2 Accord~ngto the scrlpt, the hair in Klng Mob's headdress 1s laced with razor wire.

3 Amer~canartist Roy Lichtenstein 11923-19971 painted in the style of 1950s comics, replete wlth spot colors and sound effects. Whaaaml is one of his most famous pa~ntings Why IS the Abbey suddenly empty? The Pander Bras are Arnold and Jacob Pander 42The Killing of the King is an alleged Masonic r~tual,enacted In the assasslnatlon of JFK, who was shot three times. Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee H a ~ e yOswald (1939-1963).is also said to have fired three shots, although acoustic analysis reveals four shots and popular theory holds that six bullets from various weapons were f~red

6 3 Accord~ngto the script. Roger is trying to say, "Suck my clit. asshole '' Her arms are in the same position as those of The Mag~c~an, which represents action from conscious awareness, or the creation of someth~ngfrom noth~ng.in most tarot decks Note the papers on her arm: "Life" points downward (towardthe groundlfirmarnent e.g our earthly existence) while "Tomorrow" points upward This meshes w ~ t hthe series'cosmology(see the f~nal issue). 7 3 "11 11 precisely Total~ty" Or. In blnary, completely switched on. Eleven IS a special number for Thelemites. 8.1 "Last tlme" was 1 8 15.5 8.5 "Flint was just a su~t."John-A-Dreams used the timesuit to return to our real~tyin several roles.

9.1 An~stCameron Stewan on the defunct Nexus Internet board "I had originally drawn thls panel as a Jack K~rbyscene of chaos, huge screaming face in the foreground, frenzied panic in the background. but was asked to change it to how it now appears. which In my opinion is a far more boring layout " 9 3 John has the convened eyes of the Outer Church 9.4 Blnary lteratlon is a process for mak~ngfractals. 102 Where do these people come from1 The Abbey is empty on page three.

Meanwhile, Dane mentally forces off the Archons and enters the Moonchild's mirror, which takes him to the interface of the diseased Universe B, where he meets Satan. As they walk through the Outer Church, it slowly changes, and they eventually find themselves near the Invisible College. Dane understands that they are on the same circle. He then learns the secret of creation -that the universe is crystal growing in liquid information, a larval entity that only exists in our dimension because things can't grow without time. Humanity itself is a larval creature poised to advance to the next level on December 22, 2012. Dane also learns the true nature of the Harlequinade - they are in fact everyone who has ever lived, divorced from their limited individual personae. After the battle, the authorities move in to clean u p the Abbey, burying Jolly Roger's body in a mass grave. The surviving members of Division X reunite and agree to embark on new adventures, while Oscar returns to take the Hand of Glory back to Cell 23. Dane and Fanny decide to head to Rio and form a new Invisibles cell. Elsewhere, King Mob is found bleeding in a phone booth and taken to the hospital by Audrey Murray. When he recovers, he joins Helga. They decide to abandon their Invisibles identities and return to their original names, agreeing to continue the struggle in new ways for the next twelve years. Two years later, Dane, now a teacher like Brian Malcolm before him, summons an unruly student after class to discuss her behavior. But rather than berate her, he produces a blank badge and asks her if she knows what it is.. . On December 22, 2012, Dane tells Gaz the story of the Westminster Abbey battle as the supercontext begins to form around them. GRANT MORRISON ON THE PROBLEMS OF THE ARTISr'S JAM The third issue of The Invisible Kingdom is the key to the entire series, yet the jam only throws more confusion at the reader. Specifically, Ashley Wood ignores crucial stage directions in the panels where the cosmology of THEINVISIBLES is supposed to be explained. The sequence is rendered incomprehensible because he didn't adhere to the script.

Recreational drug Sky comes into use

Mason Lang's processors standard US military issue

Kay illicitly uses ganzfeldt tank at Berkeley to write The lnvisibles

ANARMY FOR THE MASSES

11.1 ReginaM u d Latin for "queen of the world." is a title used to refer to Mary of Nazareth. Jesus' mother in the Christian belief system.

Not at all. I mean, you just don't know what's been drawn there. I just saw it and thought, Well, that doesn't look like much. I don't know ifpeople will understand it. And they didn't. Some people did - I've read some people who just completely got it, but it was definitely not what I'd described, and it doesn't even suggest what I'd described. It would take a really keen understanding of everything else in the series to make sense of the three pages, and if you hadn't quite grasped all of the other things in the series, this issue should have explained them to you. But it doesn't in the slightest. And again, there were a lot of production mistakes that were made there. For once it wasn't my fault. Draft dialogue got thrown up on the pages; the actual dialogue wasn't there. John Ridgway made a similar blunder in the panel that was supposed to reveal the true secret of the Harlequinade (15.3).

We're supposed to be seeing everyone from the series rather than this cheesy fill-in effect here. It's like Dane is supposed to be multiplying into everyone we'd ever seen. There's a lot more like that. The eclipse was supposed to be a vescica pisces, which is the Christian fish symbol extended into two interlocking circles, which to me was the model for the universe. He just draws a solar eclipse.

Sabaoth is another name for God; it also refers to the armies of heaven. In the Gnostic belief system. only the evil god uses armies. 11.2The Templars allegedly worshiped an idol called Baphomet, which took the form of either a black cat or head. Others believe Baphomet to be the source of all evil: Aleister Crowley took it as one of his names. One etymology of the name pins it on a commingling of two Greek words meaning "absorptioninto w~sdom." 12 The next four pages differ greatly from the original scripts: as th~sis perhaps the key sequence in the enttrery of THEINYISIBLES. script extracts are reprimed here w~ththe kind permission of Grant Morrison. This page was redrawn by Cameron Stewart for the The lnvisibleK~ngdomtrade paperback. From the script: The next fewpages are probably the most important in the whole series - this is the grand unveiling that the readershave been waiting for since 1994. Therek some preny weird shit visuals here. so stretch. Wek defining a whole new cosmologyhere, so let's really make i t PEW 12.1 From the script. Jack is walking with Satan as seen ~nV.Z:ZO - through the devastatedLondon of the Outer Church. 123 From the script: Jack[and/Satan walkacmss the dreadful wastelandpast the girl with the baby We follow them. Up aheaohere are huge grotesque Chris Weston bug-thingsglimpsed throuoha swirl of toxic mist Bevond . that.. we see what couldbe rowers like Westminster in the haze of the bleachedhonzon. This is a world of repsating horror, defoliated and bombedandroamed by the monsters of the Outer Church 125 From the scr~pt:Jack and Satan walk under the hideous flea-monstrosities.Jack looks up at the horrors which really don?seem so horrible after all. 13 Th~spage was redrawn by Cameron Stewart for the The lnvisibleKingdomtrade paperback. 13.1 Anti-Maatwould be a goddess of lies and mjustice: Maat is the Egyptian goddess of truth and justice, presidingover souls in the underworld From the script: Helgab face unfolds into biological honor - the unfolding of Kali, death and dewtation, life and generatfan 132 From the script. Jack and Satan. The great flea-things seen e backgroundare reachingup to pluck fruit from luscious trees that grow here Grass emerging from the cracks and ruin in the distance as the landscapesubtly changes, flushing with life Greenetybegins to appear between the cracks.

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Kay becomes a student at Berkeley

OCT 25 Mason tang frees Kay from asylum

Kay meets Takashi Satoh

13.3 From the script. longshot followingJackand Satan towards the lnvisibleCollege. alive w~th lights in the wonderful twilight. Three figures wait ahead. silhouettedby the green light of an eerie floatingcircle. We've never seen the Invisible College from here before. Wek behindi t and therek a river with a bridge and the general ambience is of dreaming spires andscholarly evenings. 13.4 Note the Harleauinade


135 From the script: Jack turns his headand we see the movement as a processthrough time, like a solid timelapse, bone merging to bone, the fuming mouih like a yawnlng gash of teeth, the eyes repeated 14 This page was redrawn by Cameron Stewan for the The Inv~sibleKingdomtrade paperback 14.1 Fmm the script With the headof the creature in the foreground, the time maggot that is Jack Frost stretches towardus. The actual illustrationis misleading: see 3 1.19.1 for a better representation of the idea 142 From the script Pull back from the moment, Jack extends into rhe future also and the future is seen as a steaming amnrotic informatron broth m which potential fonns are curled in wait. Qurtea different image is ultimatelypresented Note the binary notation in the background.

14.3 From the script. And back in a great knoned life cast - the shapes we make rn the surrounding space as we progress through time 14.4 From the script And back- a huge centipedal tree of tune, human hves extendedback - the whole thing glimpsedthrough the smoky red light of the seethingcrystal sphere rn which the whole monstrous anenomeof all Me on Earth andall the farled branches ... a great tlmetrack expressed back to the mitochondr~alroots The true shapes of life on Earth. The spheres Intersectand swallow one another like hungry sphincters, collapsingand whorling tunnel vortices across the structure of the time solid - the unrverse as a single entiv.

14.5 From the script Anda frnalglrmpse of the beyond- the time c~ystalitself w~thits great and monstrous coiled, rwitchrnganenome of 11feIS growing back into whorling electrrc-colored rnfospace. The crystal is anendedby glowing srlver blobs, metamorphic magrc mirror entities of the 5th dimension - our true selves - the adult form of which we and all our ancestIy are but the larva. 152 Note Pierrot and Columbine as lnfin~tewormlrke views through inf~nity:this is what 3.2.14.1 should have looked like. Note the background of th~spanel and the next, Dane is supposed to be outside of time seelng everything at once, a recurring theme. From the script: The Harlequinade are still behrnd [Jack] but they've changedandare rn therr tredt~onal costumes Aerrot and Columbrne make hand shapes More images vibrate off them - Edrth, Tom. Robin, King Mob. 153 From the scrlpt: Now they are the Klng e Yellow and his dwarves, makinghand movements. Behindthem, a whole crowdseethes - everyone who> ever appeared in the series .. The Harlequinade rs everyone 15.4 "Try to remember' IS a recurring theme. 15.5 From the script' Helga looks up offpanel - a final word falls, dislodgedby someone h~gh1n the vaulting. We can read "Murderer. '' 16.1 Sir M~lesIS slngtng the Eton College Boat~ng Song. Where is his moustache?

There's a controversy over whether or not the hanging of Sir Miles was censored.

Initially I'd had him hanging normally, which actually makes more sense. But then for some reason at the end I thought it had to be the actual Hanged Man [from the tarot]. PHIL JIMENEZ ON RETURNING TO THE IMllSlBLES

Why didn't you return for Volume 3?

That's a really good question; I can't really remember. I was asked. I could have sworn I drew something. I honestly have no idea. I remember talking about what pages we would get, because I was going to get Jack explaining how the universe worked, and then it just never happened. SEAN PHILLIPS ON MISSING THE ARTISTS' JAM

Why didn't you participate in the final jam arc?

I wasn't asked. I hadn't read an actual issue since Steve Yeowell stopped drawing it the first time. After that I just read the scripts. By the time the comic was printed, I'd flick through it but would hardly ever get around to reading them. I read very few comics nowadays, especially ones I've been involved with. After I've stopped drawing them, I find it very hard to just be a reader after being so involved. Sorry Grant, but it was just a job. TIIEINVISIBLE was Grant's baby. I was just there to help it along.

PN: The art selection is abominable, with major plot points rendered unintelligible thank to poor editorial coordination and some frankly unpublishable art. (Anyone figuring out that King Mob is slashing the soldier'sfaces with razornuire in his headdress on page two without the benefit of reading the script gets bonuspoints.) The Abbey alternates between empty and full, and Sir Miles can't seem to make his mind up about which pistol to use (or even how short to trim h k moustache), not to mention the sabotage to the revelation of the I

162 A rare uncensored swast~kaIn the background 16.4 The script specifies that six pages fall from Sir Miles' book. He's In the shape of the Hanged Man from the tarot, symbol~zlngdeath and reb~rth 16.5 Accord~ngto the script, Helga IS collecting Sir Miles' urine. ItS unl~kelyhe would actually do much more than break his leg jumplng like that

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Fastbreeding nanomachines go rogue; start global flu epidemic

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Mason Lang wins control of the Western military industrial complex

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17.1 From the script The ec/ipsepassesandfora momentthe sun and moon cross one another i n the shape of the vescicapisces. 17.4This panel recalls Nazi disposal of Jewish internment camp victims during the Holocaust. Note Jolly Roger In the foreground. 17.5 Th~sIS supposed to be King Mob. although the figure appears to have hair.

182 Harrod's IS a famous department store located In Knightsbridge. London. 183 Note the quotation marks around the Hand of Glory 18.4 Note Audrey Murray passing the cafe on the left. 18.5 "Nobody ever dies:" according to Grant they get re-absorbed Into the supercontext. 19.5 Though ~tisn't the same one. Tom left Dane a Tesco bag on 1.16 23 in a nice bit of symmetly 20.1 Audrey's husband is Bobby Murray, killed by King Mob on 1.1.35lrevisited in issue 1.12). The pol~ceare look~ngfor King Mob. 213 Life as film is a recurring theme

Harlequinade's identity. Absolutely unforgivable are the Ashley Wood pages, the climax of the entire series itseK in which virtually nothing in the script is illustrated (doubly maddening is the revelation that these pages were oriffinally to be handled by Phil Jimenez). Indeed it's tempting to wonder in the spirit of chaos, Grant hadn't engineered to have t h i ~ issue edited by a locked roomful of monkys. But the finalpage is sublime, and the return of Audrey Murray and subsequent vindication of Gideon S t a r o m s k i is deeply moving, a brilliant conclusion to the series as a whole. Who knew the best was right around the cornm? KCS: I don't even know where to begin. Who are these Pander Bros. and why were they brought into a series they were never involved with to draw such importantpages?%e same can be said.for Cameron Stewart and Ashley Wood. At least Stewart draws recognizable pictures for quality, publishable art. Wood's art should have been sent back. I can't think of a single excuse to print this h u e the way it was. It's almost as if DC was intentionally sabotaging the series. Two extremely important sequences rendered meaningless by bad art. Part of an editor'sjob is to say, "Hy, this is unacceptable." Who cares ifa book ships late? Ipaid my three buck for this issue, for the culmination of the entire series, and Igot shafted. I"m sure there are great moments here, but they're lost now.

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Rogue swarm of nanomachines escape at Changi Airport

DEC 22 Robin activates original timesuit; travels back in time

DEC 22 Jack Frost with Gaz as he dies

Go Tell h on the Mountain is a Christian hymn, as well as an autobiographical 1953 novel by James Baldwin (1924.19871. 221 The person in the foreground wears the logo for the Nexus, a defunct real-worldonline collective of k a s ~ r t fans s

222 This is the recruiting of Reynard. Her clothing, according to the script: Straight Edge/Stepford wife/New Romantic/Early 80s Lad; Di/8louse and Jodhpurs/Mdw~chCuckoos/Cute handbag on table/Avon Lady/Straight Edge Xon hand Happy face Nazi armband Badge' SEX O~INK DRUGS MEOM 224 According to the script, Jack is wearing Sir Miles' Eton tle

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JUN 00 Grant Morrison Writer Frank Quitely Pencils John Stokes Inks Daniel Vozzo Colors and Separations Todd Klein Letters Shelly Roeberg Editor Brian Bolland Cover

In December 2012, Dane and former student Reynard break into the global headquarters of Technoccult. He's not entirely surprised to find it secretly run by Gideon, who has developed a game called The Invisibles, delivered via inhalant can, in the hope of nonviolently transforming the world into Invisibles. Dane plays the game while, elsewhere, Robin and Takashi head for the timesuit launch. The supercontext approaches and Gideon finds himself moving through time, first watching Takashi die in the Archon attack on the timesuit, watching Edith meet the Harlequinade and then witnessing her miscarriage, and seeing Dane boiling the green glove. He then finds Fanny in the wreckage of the timesuit launch on December 22, and pulls her out of the room. The timesuit rotates into 2012, revealing itself to be the King-of-AllTears. Gideon doses it with Key 64 and shoots it with a gun that spits out a flag reading: POP! The Archon vanishes, while in space, astronauts make physical contact with RARBELiTH, which crumbles away. Robin emerges from the supercontext to reunite with Gideon just moments before the falling snow of the supercontext coalesces, leaving reality a tabula rasa.. .

I%


GRANT MORRISON ON THE END OF THE lNVlSlBLES

The third volume was supposed to count down to the millennium, but it got derailed somewhere along the way.

The countdown was actually Shelly's idea, and I just thought, Oh, I'll do it. I didn't care. It would have been funny in the end to end on number one. A lot of people bought it thinking it was a great new comic, and there were no more! had a very weird Everyone who worked on THEINVISIBLES experience. It must have been so weird, because it was coming out of one person's experience. I think it must have been hard for the others to grasp. [Frank Quitely'sl great. Ragged Robin trailing off into time like that (3.1.19.1) is what it should have looked like, that's what Ashley Wood should have drawn (3.2.14.1).

1 Dane and his student Reynard from 3.2.22. They're climbing a massive video wall of Invisible Shae Fox in a nice b ~oft meta-reflection (reynard being French for "fox." the two being examples of the two d~vergentstrands of lnvisiblism by 20121 Reynard IS narrating.

2 GonerdammerungIS an opera cycle by German composer Richard Wagner (1813.18831, about Ragnarok, the destruction of the world in a final battle between the gods and the forces of evil in Norse mythology. Wagner coined the term gesamtkunstwerkto describe the total un~ficatton of all a n - a sort of supercontext? 21 Straight-edge is a punk movement stressing zem-tolerance for drugs and sex. Al stands for artific~alintelltgence, a term for "th~nk~ng" computers. Man~chaeanrefers to duality, primarily the battle of light (good) and dark (evil). The term takes its name from the third-century Persian scholar Manes (b.Shuriak, also known as Mani or Manichaeus; c 216-2761, who taught dual~st~c philosophy as a new religton. A memeplex is a collective group of ideas or skills. tndividually known as memes, that propagate better together than alone. In THEINMSIBLE~. Grant coins the term MeMePlexto describe personal~ty A context is the posit~oningof information relatlve to other pieces of information, the supercontext is probably all~nformationpresented at once without interrelatton: or, the one plece of information that makes everything else make sense.

2 2 Note the Technoccult poster in the background: Gideon's g ~ gslnce quitting the lnvisibles in 1999 Tum-mo is a Tibetan yogi exercise to create "inner fire." Jack 1s heattng Gaz, though in reality the aim is to turn negatlve emotion into positive force

2.3 Lemming-brand shoes is a nice touch, lemm~ngs are small mammals that follow each other bltndly to the sea, where they generally drown.

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3 Note that this volume opens and closes with group shots of the lnvisibles - despite the fact that they're not together as a team for the duration1

the supercontext

Ktng Mob's shin IS a RAF target symbol twisted Into a moblus strip, itself a kind of infinity symbol. The balloons here foreshadow the supercontext.


4.1 The 1897 Bram Stoker (1847-1912)novel Dracula details a Transylvanianvampire loose in Victorian London. Dracula went on to become perhaps the most famous monster In Western culture. 4.2 The X-Men is a long-runnlngcomlc book franchise published by Mawel Com~csbeginning in 1963. Created by Stan Lee (b.Stanley Lieber. 1922) and Jack Kirby [b Jacob Kurtzberg. 191719941, it concerns the adventures of a group of genetic mutants who defend the same human societies that ostracize them for their super powers. Grant Morrisonwrote the series New XMenfrom May 2001 Note the McDonald's logo on the moon on the top of this panel. PepsiCo. has threatened to project the Pepsi symbol on to the moon for years At the bottom of the panel. it appears as though the contact w ~ t hBARBELiTH is being televised.

4.4 '"The E~therIOrMillennium " Binaries agaln 5.1 In Kundal~niYoga, the Thousand-Petalled Lotus, or Sahastrara Chakra. is the highest polnt of spiritual advancement, representing a unlon between the mascul~neSh~vaand fem~nineShakti powers (the foundat~onof reality, as seen on the cover of 3.21. Thousand-PetalledLotusZis probably a v~deogame by Technoccult replicating the experience P~ezoactivemeans activated by pressure

5.2 Dane's wrong - Edith emalled her memoirs to K~ngMob on 3.5.1.4. Mason must have d~edearlier the same year. ~f Robin3 predictionthat he controls the military Idustrial complex by 2012 is correct.

5.5 "The Church of Crow-Daddy.'' implies that Jim Crow established a Voodoo church at some polnt. 6.1 Note the Hand of Glory In a box on the right. K~ngMob must have retrieved it from Cell 23 (where 11was returned In the prevlous issue) Note the butterfly shadow on the ground - a butterfly 1s meant to be powerlng the quantum computer with the flap of its wlngs (also shown in the next panel) in a sublime reference to the butterfly effect.

6.2 It looks like InvisibleNactually gets off the ground. see 3.12.13.2. 6.4-6.6 King Mob as portrayed in each volume 7.1 Magic Eye pictures were a br~effad In the mid'90s: they consisted of a seemingly chaotic series of nonsense images that resolved Into a picture ~f v~ewedfrom the correct perspectlve. 7 2 Transynthesis IS the union of two th~ngsto form an all-new th~rd Oreos are a snack from the Nablsco company. comprised of two chocolate cook~essandwiching a cream filling. If you need this note. God help you.

7.3 Note the cover of Volume 1 Issue 1 on the gas canister (althoughthe logo has been m~sspelled) Reality as a game is a recurring theme. 7.4 Binary fractals 7.5 "Extreme Impact Environmental Immersion Option" = EEIIO, the refrain from the ch~ldren's song Old Macoonaid Hada Farm, in wh~chthe singer "becomes" various farm animals 8.1 Life as f~lm,a recurring theme If we're under continual suwe~llance,we are in a movie.

That final issue has the essence of the whole series in it.

And even then it just keeps condensing. "Our sentence is up" is the entire series again, but now it's reduced to just words. And then it goes right then in to "up," which is the actual word which is telling us what to do. And then it goes right in to the point, which is the universe collapsing completely, and we are liberated by a full stop. Why does it take us 13 years to get from spotting BARBELiTH emerge from the moon via satellite and actually sending astronauts to check it out?

The idea is that NASA just isn't u p to it. They got there and they'd kind of examined it, hut this is the first time they'd actually done anything. Fate, basically, is what had happened. The motion of touching BARBELiTH is the minute the universe's seal is opened and the placenta disengages and we grow up. Or it's also the moment when the time machine is engaged, which allows people from the future to enter our space and allow us entry into the complete, whole future. Or it's the moment when the nanomachines go rogue and eat the Earth and intuit this atomic thing that's pure consciousness and can turn itself into anything. Or it's the moment when the game breaks. Or whatever.


FRANK QUITELY ON COMPLETING THE INMSBLES How did you get assigned to illustratethe all-important final issue?

I thought I never would. I first worked with Grant on FLEXMENTALLO, which I started in '94, then NEWTOYS,and then EARTH2. Grant was always telling me how much he liked my work, and I had mentioned more than once was my favorite comic, so I had always that THEINVISIBLES been secretly crushed that he'd never asked me to draw an issue. I think he waited 'ti1 halfway through Volume 3 before he did. Had you been reading THEINVISIBLES previously?

Yes. I started out buying them, and at some point during the run DC put me on their comps list and I ended up getting them for nothing. So I read them - monthly, in order - as they came out, letter pages and all. How did you approach completing a series that you weren't previously associated with? I suppose I could have had all sorts of reservations about it because it was such a big deal to me, but it was the easiest, most enjoyable thing. I hadn't drawn any of the previous issues, but I felt associated with it the way anyone who reads it and gets really into it would. The fact that there had been so many different artists on it previously made it easier for me, because the readers were used to seeing the characters and settings depicted in a wide variety of styles. What was it like working from Grant's script, which called for a lot of non-linear and abstract imagery?

It's a joy to work from any of Grant's scripts. I've had the pleasure of working on quite a few over the years. Getting a new script from Grant is like getting a big present with a bow on it, not like an Aunt Moira present, more like an Uncle Jimmy present (use two extremes from your own extended family and you'll know what I mean). As for the non-linear and abstract - well, if Grant can imagine it, he can write it down; and if I can read it, I can draw it up. Which isn't to say that what you see on the page is what Grant saw in his head - there's always likely to be a bit of the Chinese whispers effect. But he's

Liber AL vel Legislalso known as Liber CCHor The Book of the Law) is a 1904 Aleister Cmwley t e a allegedlychanneled into his mind from another intelligence. and Crowley's subsequent analysis and commentary Its essence is summarized as "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." The Kabbalah is a collection of mystical teachings based on an esoteric interpretationof the Hebrew scriptures, focusing on the nature of reality Note BARBELITHon the right-handscreen, while the icon on the lett screen IS an allusion to Mason Lang's homeopathic software (liquid information). A quark IS one of two basic elements of matter. Jesus as television star, unsurprisingly. 112 Of course you can play a can 5 times: 5 is a magick number.

8.3 Zion alternately refers to Jerusalem. Israel, any theocracy focused on the Christian god, and heaven. Changi A~rportis a real location in Singapore. ItS interesting to speculate whether this rogue nanite swarm might not be the origin of magic mirrorltt wouldn't be the first "multiple explanation' in the series) This nanite swarm IS not the one that spurred Robin to wear the bracelet. The events were previously visited on 2.6.10.4. 8.4 Gideon may as well be talking about the series 1.5 "1 use the en-eh-mee" is a lyric from the Sex Pistols' song Anarchy in the UK.

9.6 Life as film again. a recuning theme. 10.1 This scene was last seen in 1.1.16. 102This scene was last seen on 2.6.11; Robin appears to be watching the same soap opera. 10.3 Takashi and his wife echo the Lovers tarot card last seen on 3.4.9.5. 10.4 This is the aftermath of the Archon anack on the tlmesult faciliw 11.1 This scene was last seen on 2.20.21. 112 "Alphabet fish and spelling sharks in the deep neon fathoms of meaning. On Sky in deep therapy tanks in the basement at Berkeley Kerry's in love w ~ t ha Straight Edger boy Says I'm sick behmd the eyes and doesn't believe she's part of the story too. Am I sick?"

113 "Try m remember: It's only a game." A theme recurring so often King Mob quotes the sertes itself here. Note the quotation marks: King Mob knows it's a theme (which shouldn't come as a surprise as he knows he's in a comic book, too). 11.4 "I thtnk I'm going mad, but feels like the best thing that ever happened to to to. Happened to to to we." Note that the panel is In the shape of THE IWlSlBIES' logo 12 Note the way the backgrounds change on this page. fime is shifting as events get closer together prior to the supercontext.

122 UK actor Christopher Lee lb.1922) is most famous for playing Oracula in several horror films. Gideon's referringto the 1974 James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun, directed by Guy Hamilton Ib 1922). 123 King Mob as seen from outside of time.


12.5 Note the scorpion inside the gun barrel: the return of "n~ceand smooth." 13.3 Athena IS the Greek goddess of truth, w~sdom, warfare and cities. She sprung fully formed from the forehead of her father, Zeus The destroyed lab was f~rstshown in issue 2.6

pretty good at painting pictures with words, so it's always challenging and refreshing trying to translate them.

14.1 See2.12.10.5through2.12.11.3. 14.2A new segment of the scene on 2.10.11 14.3 Acontinuation of the scene on 14.2 as Ed~th meets the Harlequ~nade.Note that she IS stand~ng in the New York hotel mom where she first encounters them, wh~chfades to St Dunstan's-inthe-East on the left and Varanasi on the r~ghtThe confluence of these important points in Ed~th'slife reinforces the theme that all time (and therefore space as well) is one 14.4 Thls scene was previously described, but not shown, In 3 6 14.4-5 Note Dane in the background everything happens at once. a recurring theme 14.5This scene was prev~ouslyshown in 2 12 10. Note Dane's speech - Gideon is outside of time. A person's hand is shaped like a claw when manipulating a computer mouse The Hand may man~festas a glove In the dream sequence because everyone can wear a glove. 1 5 3 After Dane and Reynard break Into Technoccult. Gideon goes to the tlme su~tfac~l~ty and meets up with Lord Fanny

How do you approach translating a script to images?

Always the same. Read. Re-read. Re-re-read, if neccessary. Thumbnail sketches in the margins of the script, spilling out onto other sheets of paper if need be. Find any reference, arrange thumbnails into page layouts, phone with any questions, or occasionally suggestions, and draw the pages. Looking back, what do you think of the finished issue?

As with every thing I do, I like it and I think it works, but it's not as good as I'd have liked it to be. So, because I can't draw it again, I'll make the next thing I do even better. That's how it goes; that's how I feel about everything I do. It's a double-edged sword. It keeps me going, it's one of my main drives, but as a result I'm never completely satisfied with my own work.

15.5 Th~sscene was orig~nallyshown on 1 13 2 3 15.6 This scene was originally shown on 1.13 22 4. 16.4-16.5 The King-of-All-Tears appears to actually be the timesuit. As with BARBELiTH, i t seems that encounters with the Archon are seen through a cultural lens (plants/timesuit/Archon). 17.1 Key 64 must be an improved version of Key 23 -the Archon belleves that what he reads IS real; thus King Mob killing him with the ''pop" the power of language flag. A tr~umphof pac~f~sm, and the new Gideon. Note also 2.12.10, in wh~ch an older Jack tells King Mob that "They'll ask you for a word, rlghtl But the word's not a word It's one of their words. man. If our words are circles. theirs are bubbles " To destroy a bubble, you popit 1 7 3 BARBELiTH appears spherical here (the circle becomes a bubble) 17.5 When a woman is about to glve birth her water breaks: something similar may be happening here as BARBELiTH prepares humanly for ~ t sbirth into the supercontext 19.1 Now that time is collaps~nginto the supercontext, Gideon IS reunited w ~ t hRobin, who's been there since 2.21.21. 21.1 Bill Clinton (b 19461was pres~dentof the United States from 1992 to 2000. 22.1 The wh~tebubbles overwrite the presentlpast -creating a blank slate That's how "everybody gets what they want "

22.4 Dane's statement has two meanings. ~t IS both the end of human~ty'simprisonment under current reality and m~ndset,and human~ty'sturn to speak (or forumulate the "rules" of reality). 22.5 Language as reality in its ult~mateform The universe IS collaps~ngInto a slngle polnt, the statement directly affecting our reality

What were your favorite characters to draw, and why? Were there any characters you would have liked to have drawn?

Jack and King Mob are probably my favorite main characters (that's me and Grant, of course - me being omnipotent and omniscient, Grant being bald), but I didn't have any favorites to draw. One of my favorite supporting characters is Orlando, but I'm so glad I didn't have to draw him, because I don't know how I would have got it to work without copying Jill Thompson's approach, which suited her style perfectly but probably wouldn't work as well with mine. For the life of me I can't think of a better way of depicting him.

I think of all the artists who worked on THEINVISIBLES and some of them did really brilliant stuff - Jill's work is probably my favorite. Another real highlight in both art and story was Steve Parkhouse drawing the stand-alone Best M a n Falls. Some artists felt a connection to the series, while others said it was just another job. How did you see it?

There's a really deep connection for me. FLEX MENTALLO was a really personal project for me, and still a favorite; WEIRD WAR'Smy favorite short story I've worked on; JLA was a dream; and I've had the pleasure of working on ten brilliant NEWX MENissues since.

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But THEINVISIBLES has the added significance of being the last issue of what I personally consider to be the best comic ever. In some small way I'm a different, richer, and maybe better person for having done THE INVISIBLES (the whole thing), and I'm planning on doing it again.

PN: After the appalling mess of The Invisible Kingdom, I came into Glitterdammerung expecting the worst. Who knew that Grant had saved the best for last, capping a n innovative series with a n innovative issue worthy of the three volumes that preceded it? Frank Quitely's art is breathtaking, completely suiting the strange new world of 2012 and the onrush of the supercontext. The script sparkles, wisely unspooling as a greatest hits reel with one eye firmly on the future. The Robin sequence in particular is inspired, explaining the nature of reality


22.6 Note that the series ends with a blank panel (recall the blank page on 1.3.22) Note too that Dane is ouotino , " - THEINVISIIES actually ends with off-panel quotation marks. signifying the transition from the fictional universe of THEINVISIBLES to our own. Grant Monison frequently describes the series as a narrative hypersigilt h ~ sIS the polnt at which the spell extends into reallty, the reader shlfting from passlve receptor to actlve partlclpant

ANARCHY FOR THE M S B

one last time for those who had yet to puzzle out the series. It's nice to see her used thematically. But for all of the brilliance of the script, the glitter of the art and the nostalgia of seeing our favorite characters one last time, there remain some aspects that don't quite work. Reynard is a clever conceit in the previous issue, but here she work against the story slightly. It's now that the series needed the grounding it forsook after Volume I . I f the supercontext comes about because a high enoughproportion of the population have ascended to the appropriate state of illumination, surely it would have been more direct to show us this by replacing Repard with a housewife mother of three?And really, no roomfor a goodbyefrom Mister Six or Jim Crow? Hands down the best issue of the series. KCS: I was scared after last issue. Oh so scared, but then the heavenly Frank Quitely came down and saved me. Beautiful pencils aside, this issue, a bit difficult on the first read, is nevertheless the chery on the sundae, so to speak. Grant'sfuture world is dazzling and terrifying. He clearlyput a lot of time and craft into this script. Seeing Boy again is a marvelous treat. I had tears in my eyes as BARBELiTH dissolved into space, and was delighted that Grant let Dane finish the book, once again giving us the skinny, just in case we missed the message along the way. It's clear as cystal, Grant. 7Banksfor the ride.

!! 3 9

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3

"Gideon Stargrave hits the opening credits at lightspeed."


SHORTS

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"Christ! Sometimes it's a real WINTER 95

pain in the

Grant Morrison Writer Duncan Fegredo Art

neck being

Daniel Vozzo Colors Clem Robins Letters Julie Rottenberg Assistant Editor Stuart Moore Editor Various Cover

King Mob finds a Voodoo doll of himself in an Invisibles mail drop and brings it to his dominatrix friend Joni for analysis. She tells him it's a hex; he must locate a defusing sigil before it's too late. While driving around in search of the random sigil, King Mob has an epiphany and returns to kill Joni. He realizes that her blood streaked on the wall is the defusing sigil. He leaves, safe, but not before strangling an MP availing himself of Joni's S&M services in order to offer a death in place of his own.

an assassin."


GRANT MORRISON ON THE INVISIBLE9 INFLUENCES Hexy is fairly difficult to fit into the series, because King Mob behaves completely differently to anything w e see in THEINVISIBLES.

1.1 A fetish IS a charm or other object believed to have magical power

1.2 "The rest of my team are out of the country right now" As the lnv~siblesdon't leave England untll after 1.24. thls Issue cannot occur dur~ng Volume1 1.3A hex IS a sign or spell bel~evedto bring bad luck 3.1 The A34 IS an Engl~shh~ghway,technically spanning Winchester to Preston.

3.2 In 1939 Gerald Gardner cla~medto be init~ated by a coven of witches in England's New Forest He subsequentlywrote the Book ofshadows, regarded as the f~rsthow-to book of w~tchcraft It has long been assumed that an ageing Aleister Crowley actually ghost-wrote the book, based on similarit~es in writ~ngstyle. 6.3 Trefo~l,vervaln. St John's Won and dill are ingredients for a W~ccanprotection spell

That one was more a kind of homage to the Gideon Stargrave Jerry Cornelius-style stories I used to d o in NEAR MYTHS,which were eight pages. And We're All Policemen was an update of that idea. I'd gone back to the roots of the NEARMYTHSstories, the Gideon Stargrave stories I'd done when I was 18. They were always eight pages in the back of little underground, black-and-white comics. And We're All Policemen I thought was a really good end. I loved it. It totally changed my head. I got a new way of thinking, a new way of working. Rut the Hexv one is more just a straight-up kind of story like I used to do when I did my own comics based on Jerry Cornelius. It's a Jerry Cornelius story. It's even written like Michael Moorcock. The captions are in the style of Moorcock. It's weird. It's nothing like what you'd see in the book. Whoever drew that, the splash page is great, with the sex cards. What's his name? Duncan?

PN: An intriguing five-page stoy (the sixth page is merely a credit~~filled splash), Hexy pre.sents a ruthless King Mob rardy seen in the serie.~proper. It's nice to see King Mob actually inside the fetish subculture instead qf.just referencing it it2 his appeura7zce. T%e linking of the SGM ads papering lJK phone booths and the Conspiracy is clever,

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and as with And We're All Policemen and the series' selfconuimxl issues, the short length is a strength rather than a hindrance. But King Mob's casual murder of the innocent MP is jarring and unpalatable. KCS: Well,for not being a big fan of King Mob, I sure did enjoy this pre-series yarn. It's a bit rough and brutal, but that's thepoint. It was a shame that KM had to killyoni, but at least it was in selfdefense, unlike a lot of his kills. n e execution of the soldier, while necessa y in the context of the stoy, was carried out with a little too much glee, but this is King Mob we're talking about. Even so, I felt strangely sory.for him. ir;be betrayal of a friend after all, is a horm'hle thing. Duncan Fegredo's art is perfect -Juid yet gritty. All in all, Hexy is a welcome addition to THE I~SIBLES.


Y

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I "I'm a false icon! The media collaborate 1998

in promoting

Grant Morrison Writer

AND WE'RE ALL POLICEMEN

Philip Bond Pencils my superficial lifestyle as somehow

Glyn Dillon Inks Daniel Vozzo Colors and Separations Todd Klein Letters Shelly Roeberg Editor Brian Bolland Cover

more valid, more worthy of attention than your real lives!"

Gideon Stargrave attends a party held by his multiply cloned sister Genevieve in Buckingham Palace to herald the dawn of a new aeon. Along the way, he experiments with pornoplasm, mulls his sister's new egg-child and tries to free his fans from the cult of celebrity.

IL


GRANT MORRISON ON BUSTING CONTINUITY

You take King Mob out of the context of THEINVISIBLES in And We're All Policemen.

I wanted to d o more of that. That was a big breakthrough for me. I did that story in 1997 when I felt the rave culture was dying, and I was trying to imagine what was coming next, and I pretty much got it right. I was thinking the children of the ecstasy generation have grown u p brain damaged, and I was thinking of things getting more punky and nasty, and the humor getting blacker, which sort of worked out. With the flower power decade revisited during the '90s I saw the response to that being a return to the kind of angry, punky.. . You got things like new metal begin to emerge, and you got black humor like Chris Morris over here in Britain become really popular. I was kind of into that. That was King Mob in the supercontext, in the first moment of engulfment, when he creates his own universe and then dies at the end of the supercontext as the ultimate pop figure. Everyone's taken his picture, everyone on Earth has taken his picture. That actually takes place after the end of issue one even. It's kind of his death experience. I hope my own is similar!

This stoly takes place immediately after 3 1. ~ n s ~ d e the supercontext An alternative text verslon of t h ~ sstory, narrated by Gideon, appears In the anthology Disco 20W. edited by Sarah Champ~on ZThe full title of this story IS And Weie All Policemen The 20th Century Died Yella Sex Dog Popism Girlism Boyism Nowism England Wakes The Awesome Toys "For Lou and Shelly" refers to DC editors Lou Stathis and Shelly Roeberg Stathis died of brain cancer on May 4. 1997, while Shelly was the cur rent ed~torof THEINVISIRLES The script states that Gideon's gun IS a ''glass sound pistol" and calls for this page to look like a tarot card for The Assassin Note that he's stand~ng in front of a reversed British flag.

3.3 The Stepford Wives is a 1975 fllm by Bryan

PHILIP BOND ON JOINING THE INMSIBLES How did you land the WINTER'SEDGEassignment, and by extension the Volume 3 assignment?

The WINTER'S EDGEstrip came out of nowhere, really. I hadn't done much comics since KILL YOURBOYFRIEND, a year before. I think I clicked with Grant as far as his pop sensibility goes, and 1 guess Shelly likes my work so 1 was always in line for something but my slow pace precluded me from the monthly books. Actually both Glyn and I are very slow workers so having us draw eight pages between us was, I think, Vertigo trying to coax us back into the fold. Glyn got frightened off, but I was in.

Forbes Ib 1926 as John Theobald Clarke) about feminists who are transformed Into submissive housew~ves Terminator2 IS James Cameron's Ib 1954) sequel to The Terminatorland to engage In anal mode for a moment, the text incorrectly refers to it as Terminator 14 The reference here IS to the villa~nous T-1000, a robot composed of lhquid metal able to morph Into any shape

3.4 The woman IS supposed to be modeled after Saffron from the UK pop group Republ~ca,but the hair color~ngruins the effect

3.5 Hamlet IS perhaps Shakespeare's most famous play, about an anguished prince. It probably would make a good ad for z ~cream. t actually

4.3 V~rtuallynone of the scripted characters are drawn here. including No 6 from The Prisoner, Alex from A Clockwork Orange, Ger~Halliwell, Peter Str~ngfellow,D~anaSpencer and Alice from Alice in Wonderland The naked guy with the glasses on the right IS artist Philip Bond 4.4 The figure on the r~ghtIS supposed to be Carl Jung. although he looks more like Albert E~nstein

5.4 "Gaze upon my works, ye mtghty. and despa~rl"A misquote from Shelley's poem Ozymandias Shelley himself was last seen in 1.8

6.1 In the Bible, three wlse men from the east travel to present gifts to Jesus at his birth

ANARKHY FOR THE MASSES

(b.1920) f ~ l mabout mysterious alien children. based on John Wyndham's (1903-19691novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The Roc is a monster from the 1958 Nathan Juran (b.1907) film The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad 6 3 Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Jurassic Park based on the Michael Crichton Ib 19421novel, is about cloned dinosaurs running amok. Beltane is celebrated on 1 May lor 15 May in Scotland) to herald the arrival of summer. ItS also an important date for pagans. 6.4 An atavism is the reappearanceof genetic material after generations of absence.

6.5 Eva Braun 11912-1945)was Hitler's mistress. 7.1 The image on the right televis~onscreen is a famous photograph from the Vtemam war. 7 2 Stoli is slang for Stolichnaya vodka. The figure on the r~ghtis Keith Flint, lead singer for UK electronics group The Prodigy 7 3 The giant woman is Geri Halliwell, better known as G~ngerof the UK pop group Spice Girls. G~deonis referring to her in the caption box as well. HAL-9WO is the homicidal computer in 2001 A Space Odyssey. Mama is a song by the Spice Girls 7.4 Chronos, last of the Titans, was the father of Zeus in Greek mythology. The Titans were a race of gods destroyed (and replaced) by Zeus. "Chronos" means "time.' which destroys all things.

8.1 Life as a game, a recurring theme The figures beating the alien on the left are from Stanley Kubrick's f ~ l mverslon of A Clockwik Orange. Gideon's pornoplasm g~rlis supposed to be morphing into someone !ho looks more like Ragged Robin. The script calls for No 6 from The PrLsonerto be chased by the Rover sphere, but this is not drawn. The butler spraypaintlng is actually supposed to be an old woman, "a blue-rinsedTory lype" painting "F"k the Lordl Try su~cide,let's be dead!"

82 Star Trek. The Next Generation (1987-19941is a US science flctlon television series, set 75 years after the orlg~nalStar Trek The holodeck is a room equipped to replicate any environment via solid holograms Another illustration of the universe-ashologram theory. Thomas the Doubter was one of Jesus' apostles in the Chrlstlan mythology, so named because he refused to believe accounts of Christ's ressurrectlon until he saw for himself. 8 3 Gideon's image of the end of the world IS fairly similar to the supercontext seen in 3.1. 8.4 The script asks for this panel to look like the end of OLvcky Man!, with Gideon taking the Malcolm McDowell role, disappearing in an onslaught of flashbulbs.

I I

freedom did you have? And W e i e All foliceme", for example, is crammed with little stories appearing in the background of many panels. Were these scripted by Grant, or your creation?

With that story in particular it was pretty much all Grant. We probably couldn't get everything he wrote in there, so despite the creative freedom there just wasn't much room for anything extra.

PN: Thefractal that is THE IMSIBLES spinsfmter and smaller in this fiction-withinfiction piece that again finds the entirety of the series condensed into eight pages. A return to the Stargrave avatar of the first volume, And We're All Policemen is a delight, taking full advantage of its nonliteral style to barrage the reader with conctptr and situations. Philip Bond's art as always is a blast, especially suited to the dayglo dream nature of the stoy. Incidentally, why this was printed in the Counting to None trade paperback instead of its proper place after 3.1 is beyond me. KCS: I've never been much of a fan of King Mob, and even less a fan of his Gideon Stargravepersona, so And We're All Policemen didn't do much for me. It's a relief to know that we allget our own version ofparadise inside the supercontext. Seeing KM's version ofparadise makes me like him even less. The art is great though. As always Philip Bond gives me a wacky cheshire grin all the way through. I wish he'd done than his brief stint on Volume3. much more of THEIMJTSIBBLES The one thing KM and I do agree on ... paradise is drawn by Philip Bond.

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"Dress the

PAPER DOLLS

dandy,

1999

Grant Morrison writer Phil Jirnenez pencils Kevin Knowles inks Daniel Vozzo colors and separations Shelly Roeberg editor Mike Allred cover

Not a story, but rather cut-out paper dolls of King Mob and Lord Fanny, "always ready to hurl battery acid on the innocent face of conformity." King Mob (in Union Jack briefs!) comes with mask, leather jacket, PVC pants and mod target t-shirt, as well as blond wig and purple velour suit for play as Gideon Stargrave. Fanny comes with six wigs, false tits and five outfits ranging from an evening gown to the down-home country attire seen in 2.1.

dad!"

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Illustration by Chris Weston

se iCI

VI 0

Z

TALKS ON THE INVlSlBLES WITH

GRANT MORRISON

"They're like Peter Greenaway movies. You can sit and study them all week."

This book offers one (or more) possible interpretations of THE INVISIBLES; you've been pretty clear that there shouldn't be a definitive explanation of the series.

There actually are people who are doing definitive versions. The Barbelith board - there's a guy there who gets it, completely understands it. It's shocking to me; this guy's in my head. He understands every single aspect of what I was doing with it and kind of has it in context. There are people who actually understand what I was trying to do with it. It's there for people to interpret, even if they interpret it badly or accuse me of doing something wrong or they've just misinterpreted it, at least I've got their reaction. A lot of it isn't even interpretation. A lot of is just people assuming

that something they've forgotten suddenly isn't there. It definitely is there, it's just a lot of people miss connections because there's so much in the book that it's kind of hard to keep everything [in your head]. How did you pitch the series to DC?

I'd done a couple of miniseries for them and was working on KILLYOURBOYFRIEND and THEMYSTERY PLAY,and I suggested to


them that I wanted to come back and do a regular monthly book, but rather than use one of their characters I'd come up with this new thing, which was THEINVISIBLES. Part of it was the fact that I'd spent all the money, as well. I'd ASYLUM and got quite rich off it, but I bought a made my mark on ARKHAM house and I traveled around the world a few times and the money was gone. I decided I'd better d o some work again. I'd actually done no work at all from '92 to '93, and I was just kind of assembling notes and traveling and kind of taking drugs and going a bit mad. The first one was a pretty big seller and it got really good publicity; it was in all the papers. It was even questioned in the House of Commons because it was so anti-authoritarian supposedly. So it got out and did pretty good business, but by the time Arcadia came out people just couldn't handle it. I kind of perversely did it deliberately to see if they could handle it. I knew they couldn't, but I wanted to say, "Here's the philosophy behind this - if you can't take it, then tough." Most of them couldn't take it. Yet they stuck with SANDMAN,which Arcadia is quite similar to in some ways. In SANDMAN,however, the story the philosophy would have been merely a background for the story, whereas in THEINVISIBLES is a background for the philosophy.

The primacy of ideas is what the series is about, really. Everything is dramatizing ideas. The spy story or the terrorist story in it is just a misdirection. It can engage your attention while the you're getting this other stuff pumped into you. How much thought did you give to the way you portrayed gay characters? Fanny and Jolly Roger aren't exactly exploding any stereotypes.

I just based it on people I knew. I wanted to use those things. You could just as easily say, "King Mob's got bald hair and piercings, so he looks like every guy in an S&M club during the '90s." Yeah, that's the point. Those are the people I was meeting and they were like that. I did meet transvestites; they were like Fanny. The lesbians I met did have short hair and did talk like that and they drove vans with a bunch of them in there and they wore shorts and big old kicker boots. I was just drawing on people I knew. It always annoyed me when people said they were stereotyped. People are stereotypes. I'm a stereotype; I fit the exact stereotype of an Aquarian, every inch of it. Stop fighting it. So what? I'd still be a real character if you put me in a comic. You did.

Yeah, exactly. I can see why people would [complain]. If you're an individual in what's perceived to be a minority group you're more concerned about your individuality. In actual fact you don't look too fucking individual to anyone else. Get used to it. I don't look individual to a group of media boys. I look exactly like every other media guy in Glasgow, despite my attempts to be an individual. We are what we eat.


Entropyin the UKsees the series start to wear its influences on its sleeve, but it also sees the overt onset of magic around the book.

Well, I was getting more confident. I'd used magick. The first arc is about Jack learning about magick, and it's my ideas about magick, which was something 1 was interested in at the time, taking Situationist ideas and applying them to magick. So it was basically the notion of shamanically empowering your own town, because that's what a shaman would do. It's not about going to South America and taking [drugs]. It's a nice holiday, but a shaman is supposed to be walking his area. That's the point; you're supposed to d o stuff. Because of the experience [in Kathmandu] I had a different view of what magick was. It just became more intrinsic - the comic became an act of magick rather than a comic about magick. There'd been many comics about magick before that, but I've done it. I touched on it in KID ETERNITY, but that was kind of to give it color, to make it more exotic. But THEINVISIRLES actually became an act of magick. I got so inexplicably drawn into it. It was roundabout that time; I think you can see me getting more enmeshed in the text from the time of Sheman onwards. This was the time you had your illness...

That came afterward. The time leading u p to it was really strange. There was a lot of weird experiments going on. From '92 onwards I got really involved in magick and really involved in drugs and really involved in weird sex. The whole thing is in there. THEINVISIRLES became about that. The transvestite stuff was me doing it, and going out like that to see what it was like, and then coming back and writing about it. It's not like I was fucking people or anything, but 1 wanted to be in that head. So I'd go and do that and be Lord Fanny for a night and come home and try to write that stuff. A lot of that was verbatim, so it's got a kind of creepy edge off it; you think, mis is something for real. After the virus storyline ends, the series relauncheswith a new volume. Had that been the plan all along?

What I had in my head was Volume 1, and then Volume 2 was this vague area. I knew they were going to go to America, I knew some of the points. There were always going to be three [volumesl. It was based on a lot of things one of them was the Buddha's experience, so there's different extremes in it. The first one was going to be British, have that kind of questioning, intellectual, caption-laden quality of British comics of the time. The second one was an American adventure, so the violence goes up and the guns go up and the glamour goes up. That was always intended. The third one was going to be a global thing, which is a confusion of everything that's been, and pushed toward what might be. So I'd had it planned, and the first one always had to be the way it was going to be, but as the second one progressed it came to life. The actual series came to life. My life and the series became indistinguishable. It was also my experiences. It's difficult to talk about THEINVISIBLES because it's fractal. We could go on forever and ever and ever. There's a story in there; there's also a critique of the story in there; there's also a biography in there; there's also


a critique of the biography; there's also an alien abduction being dissected by the person who thinks he's been abducted via the medium of the comic; there's a spell in there. There's so many things that could be talked about. There's also just me doing what was happening at the time. At that point I was spending a lot more time in America, so the series suddenly became about the American experience and about the glamour and the infection that America lives under, the infection of itself. I began to see that's what it was, and that's where THE INVISIBLESends up. It begins with an action movie, and by the end the action movie's been cut into pieces and there's nothing left. It's the Tower. America's fallen at the end, Mason's house has fallen. I began to see America at the end of its century. Its hardest century, and it's about to collapse and decline the way Britain did over the last century. I saw the signs of it. I realized that America controls itself and the world through the medium of light. That was a genius thing. The British empire used ships to conquer the world. But Americans thought if you create an image of yourself that's so seductive, regardless of whether it's true or not, everyone will want in. So they present an image of America that was '50s deluxe curtains, atomic families, beautiful cars. Everything was perfect. The Beaver, you know? Everybody was good: Velcro was good, the Army was good, everybody's your friend. Atoms are your friend. But in actual fact the country was recovering from depressions. It was rap groups, your revolutionary movements, beatniks, drunks, drug abuse, racial tensions. And it continued, and those things erupted. And yet the films kept saying, "Hey look, Tom Hanks is in charge. Bruce Willis is here. America's intact." In the amount of time I spent there I felt there was an America on the east coast, and it's one America. There's an America on the west coast that's a completely different America. Those two can almost talk, because they've got commerce in common. And somewhere in the middle is this entire void with lots of weird shit. There are people who don't even know there are other countries in the world. We would turn up for signings in the middle of places and it'd just be weird rednecks and always the one kid who was a goth. So he was pissy because he was this little guy who'd go down to the mall and get the shit kicked out of him every day because he was the one rebel in town. America's not what it pretends to be. Not where the wealth is, nor the land of Nike and success and those elements and certain parts of it. But it has sold that image completely through movies, and we've believed it, because we believe the movies. They seem real. People talk and emote and act in them, and they're all beautiful. America must be doing well; it must be the place to go to. You can see it in America's scripted president, the way Bush initially focused on repealing change, Cheney's drive back to the atomic power glorified in the '503.

They believe their own hypnosis. Those are guys that I believe can be hypnotized. [They're what1 Ken Wilber would call blue thinkers, who live in a tribal, territorial mindset, when everyone else is moving on desperately trying to get to what Wilber calls the green mindset, which is an inclusive, global ... way of thinking. But, I mean, [Bush is] not even at that. So it's no surprise. He probably fell for all that stuff.


Not that he's a bad guy; I think he honestly believes that the dogma he's said is the truth, and that he is helping people by giving them more atomic power or by allowing corporations to cut down the rainforests which actually allow us to breathe. It was interesting to see the official response to the western US power crisis in early 2001. The problem wasn't the American way of life, but rather too few power plants. Nobody in an official position ever stops to ask if this picture we're putting out about us is wrong.

And there's loads of ways to d o it. There's people [in denial], which has always annoyed me, because being an Aquarian and a utopian sometimes you d o feel like [telling them], "You're living on the fucking planet Earth. Be reasonable! Let us do this and everything will be fine. Stop arguing like it's some kids' argument." But you have to stop putting these guys in charge, because the only people who want power are people who think like children. Anyone who's smart doesn't want power. I don't want power. It's in decline, but I think it'll be good. It'll be a shock to America's system, but I think they'll handle it. The thing is, Britain took 50 years to get over the empire, and then suddenly, "Oh, okay, we can have the Beatles and the Stones and psychedelia," and suddenly this country goes insane. America's in the same position. I said it again in THEINVISIBLES. I wondered why at the end of the '90s SPAWN was popular and Marilyn Manson was popular, and new metal and skate goth was so popular, because it's not over here and people don't care about that kind of stuff. But in America, where there's such conspicuous consumption and such obsession with glamour and beauty, why is there a shadow side that's so obsessed with death, decay, destruction, stress, fucked-up bodies and torn steel, misery, depression ... 'Feel the love' stuff goes best over there. It's just college kids who moan, "Why have I never been poor?" They've been drinking their milk all their life. They've actually got nothing to complain about; the complaint is this vague, existential thing. I linked it to the fact that over a hundred years ago the British were obsessed with seances, corpses, graves, Jeckyll & Hyde. It's actually the same thing: The country knows its soul is dying, and it becomes obsessed with energies of death and destruction, death and decay. Because it's over. Back then, the empire was finished but didn't want to admit it. But the fantasists knew .it, and the people who were allowing the influences from outside into their heads were intuiting it and talking about it. The same thing is happening in America.

You'll get over your empire. It swept across the globe in a westward direction. It always ends up: These people take over the world, cause a lot of junk, don't know what to do, fall into decline, and then get into parties and fashion and pop music and so forth. That's what America's got to look fonvard to. In France there's just parties, fashion, pop music. In Britain there's just parties, fashion, pop music. King Mob was your avatar - how did Jill Thompson deal with losing hers when you refashioned Ragged Robin as a fetish sex kitten for Volume 2?

That wasn't connected. It started out that King Mob was kind of drawn like me and had no hair - I'd had hair during the whole first series. I shaved it off for the second


series and kind of just became the character then. I put a bit of myself in the book and a bit about my life. So I like to have a fantasy character, and I was also thinking that Neil [Gaiman] had done pretty well by sticking himself in THE SANDMAN. He was getting a lot of interesting goth girls coming to him at conventions, and I thought, That's cool. Maybe if1 start that and become the character,people will come up and talk to me. So there's a lot of thinking in there. But Jill obviously had drawn Ragged Robin as her, because we'd been in San Francisco together, and I'd said, "We'll do this character." I wanted her to be like Crazy Jane from DOOM PATROL. I'd kind of taken elements of that. Crazy Jane had been based on Patti Smith and on the schizophrenic multiple personality case, Trudi Chase. It was the kind of character I thought there was mileage in; it was a female character, which hadn't really been done before. So I found this way to get into it. A lot of people I knew were that type of girl, the long, really knotted hair and they wore a big floppy hat like Sylvia Plath would. As the series went on I realized the character wasn't working. It's because I'd identified King Mob and Ragged Robin too much as me and Jill, so I didn't want anything to l~appento them. They weren't even getting any personalities, because I didn't want to d o anything Jill might get upset with. Everyone said that, especially in the first one, they didn't know who that character was. The weird occult shit that surrounds it was suddenly technology in the bracelet that protects her from nanomachines. I thought, "Where'd she get that? Ragged Robin's from the future! Oh, of course!" Suddenly that was THEINVISIBLES there on a plate at the end of the first volume. There'd been no time machine in it at all up until the end of the first volume. I hadn't even planned for the time machine. I knew it was something to d o with a time machine, but it wasn't Robin. It wasn't what happened in Volume 2. So suddenly she became a character and I thought, Well, I have to allow her to live. And I thought, How did King Mob deal with stepping down as leader? They have to breathe a bit and talk a bit and show us the characters. That's what the Invisibles do, which is change their personality every time. Whenever there's a new person in charge they change their personality, to become a new person or swap roles. I leveraged this from the fact that I saw it as Jill. So the character became this other person, drawn slightly differently, made to look a bit like whoever it was at the time, some actress - the one from Starship Troopers. I thought, If we could make her look a hit more like that.. . And [Brian] Bolland just caught it perfectly in that third cover, she's become this sort of sex kitten. I think Jill was a little, "They're having sex. Are you trying to get me?" Her husband was like, "What the fuck's this? He's shagging my wife by proxy!" You've been accused of brushing off Boy instead of investing in the character.

I think Boy's a great character. A lot of people feel that I've neglected her, but she makes a decision in it. The rest of them go forward into just a kind of selfdisintegrating pop overdrive. But Boy steps out and goes into the world again and brings back everything she's learned into the real world. She has a kid, and we see her when she's older. She's great, but she didn't fit anymore. She had nothing to d o with what had to be said in the last book. She goes through what King Mob goes through at the end of the third volume, when he leaves the lnvisibles to found Technoccult.


He does it in a different way, a completely different way, but it's the same thing. I actually think she's a strong character. And again, she wrote her part in the story; she wrote her way out. There was nothing more to be said. Phil Jimenez said he left the series because the scripts kept coming later and later, and Chris Weston said that he enjoyed working on the book upon reflection but that it wasn't any fun at the time. What was going on?

The comic and the life were the same thing. I was working really hard, and I was doing JLA as well. I was very late because I'd been sick. My friends were concerned about me. You find yourself six months behind deadline, always, so you can never catch up. I'd get up in the morning at nine, I'd work thirteen hours and then go to sleep and d o it all again. And that was all that was happening. I'd get maybe a page to Phil one day, and then he'd get another page. It must have driven him mad. It drove Howard Porter mad on the Justice League book. But somewhere along the line we just created magic. I got into it and began to serve the magic. I couldn't write that way again - I wouldn't even want to. Things were coming out that were just outrageous concepts. Anything just to get it on the page, no matter how insane or what I might think of next. Just put it on the page because Phil's waiting for it. Did that carry through to the third volume?

No, by Volume 3 it was starting to slow down, you can tell. But Volume 2 was just manic energy. That's why it's so great, and why so many people come into THEINVISIBLES via that and then kind of get dragged into the other stuff. It was just insane. It was the truest INVISIRLES. It was the most channeled. I didn't know what the fuck [was going on]. I'd just gobble some drugs and write THEINVISIBLES that day, and it was just whatever I felt like, whatever theory was going through my head. Because of that it works; it actually all hangs together and makes sense. I trusted the process; I trusted that THEINVISIBLES was this thing being downloaded through me and it had to come out. It didn't matter what state I was writing it in; I was writing it on drugs, I was writing it on painkillers, I was half asleep, I was sick with pain, and still it kept coming through. Yet ironically the second volume is the most traditional - a fairly straightforward action comic.

I'm probably best when I just do that. The more I let the intellectual pretensions through, the work is poorer for it. I think it's better to run with it. THEINVISIBLES is a spell to create Invisibles.

Yep. It was a lot of things. It was a very complicated spell. I worked on it while I was in New Zealand. I drew [a sigill on my chest and held it in my hand and I jumped off a bridge. I did a bungee jump to power it, and then threw it in the water and wiped it off. It was very wide-ranging. Initially it was just supposed to change aspects of my life I wasn't happy with, which it did completely, in a frightening, dramatic way. And it was supposed to create links with people around the world that felt the same way but hadn't spoken at the time.


Back then it's hard to remember there was no X Files, there was no Internet. I met Doug People weren't connected in that way. And through THEINVISIBLES Rushkoff and Richard Metzger. All these people that were interested in the same stuff. And suddenly, from having lived in the Planet of the Apes you finally meet people you can talk to. You can spend time with your own kind and talking about stuff that you know because you've experienced it. People aren't going to laugh at it or misunderstand it. Everyone's there talking. What does it actually mean? What are the gaps that we all know are there but no one ever wants to talk about? And all of a sudden the world's got this crazy international community of brilliant minds that I've now got access to. I also wanted it to invade the culture, because I didn't like it. It was boring. I felt that if you could invade the culture with energies that I like ... You know, guys in Jerry Cornelius coats. And then bang! You get Austin Powers. You get 7'beMatrix, which is all Gnostic stuff and insect machines from other dimensions. Can we clear up how you feel about The Matrix?

The first time I saw it was in Melbourne. I saw it on acid with some friends. I just thought it was the greatest fucking movie I'd ever seen in my life. It was fantastic. But then I came back home and thought, It wasgreat, it's like this s t u . But Mark Millar said, "It's so like this stuff. You should go back and read Volume 1 of THEINVISIBLES again." Then I got really kind of pissed off, because I saw how much had been lifted. If you cut out every panel of THEINVISIBLES and arrange them in a new order you can practically storyboard The Matrix.

Yeah. It is that close. I don't think they could deny it. After the initial rage, when I really went through it plot point by plot point and image by image... The jumps from buildings, the magic mirror, the boy who's being inducted called the One, the black drones, the shades, the fetish. The Kung Fu as well. The dojo scene. The whole thing - the insect machines that in fact are from a higher dimension, which supposedly enslaved their own. The entire gnostic theme.

But then I began to think, Well, wasn't that what the spell was supposed to do? Quit griping! You see more of it in every Backstreet Boys video on MTV. Suddenly I felt my territory invaded. That was stuff that nobody had even been doing in comic books or in pop culture. It was always there in the underground, because that's where I'd come out of. But suddenly it was everywhere; you kind of feel that the gazelles have come to your watering hole and are drinking in a kind of a farewell to that your water. So for me it was the end of THEINVISIBLES; and trying to move forward into a different way of thinking, a different way of working. Because everybody was into psychedelia and drugs and other realities, the comic was becoming a set of cliches - you know, the group who opposed strange forces from other dimensions. The initiated ones who stand between us and the dark side. So many of these things started to crop up. THEINVISIBLES was on the set. People who were there have told me. Those guys are comic


fans. They were Vertigo fans in particular. The fact that they put Kung Fu and fetish and bald heads and sex all in the one movie.. . Shifting gears, how did you get into magick?

When I was a kid. My uncle Billy was really into magick. My mum believed. So everybody was kind of a bit witchy. We had an amazing library. I got into mythology books first as a kid, and then magick. It just seemed bizarre and exciting. I read a lot of it. I was purely a reader until I was about nineteen; then I thought, Well, these guys claim that ?fyou do this, this will happen. If you follow these instructions in this recipe, you will get a demon, or you will get the god Mercury. So I'd read all this stuff. I'd made up stories about superhero priests fighting the dark side and used these kind of things to color it. [I thought] it was a curio; they were just saying this because it was interesting. And then I tried an experiment and it worked. I made what seemed to be a contact with another intelligence. I was a nineteen-year-old boy; I'd never had a drink. I hadn't taken any drugs or done anything like this up until that point. I was shocked. I just began to experiment from there on in. I did more and more, and I guess that by the time I was doing THEINVISIBLES I was a really good practicing magician. THEINVISIBLES changed everything. The art and the magick and the work and everything else just became one thing. 1 stopped doing magick. It happens. It happens in a zen framework. How much of the book's cosmology do you believe?

Pretty much all of it. I don't know if I believe it; it's just a good working model. It came to me in a series of intuitions and understandings and downloads. I trust it. 1 came up with my own stuff; it wasn't stuff I read in books. I read the books to get validation for what had happened. I found so much validation I'm fairly close to believing it. Enough that it's my personal religion, why I don't have the same fear of death I had, because I actually d o think we're part of some hyper-dimensional entity about to be born. Do you believe in the supercontext?

Well, the supercontext is where it gets born into. The supercontext is where I was taken in my alien abduction. That's what the larva is born into. It includes space and time, but space and time are only parts of it. The reason you have to grow the larva in space and time is because only in time do things grow. Our universe is actually a very simple fractal generated by a simple process, and it only has binaries in it. Humans can conceive beyond good and evil, and beyond duality, but yet we can't d o it. The universe stops you. But in mathematical states people can actually go beyond duality. We know it exists; these things are there already, I think. They seem to be; it's just on another level. A fifth-dimensional consciousness. Outside the three dimensions of space and one of time you can look at it like an object, and that's where the babies are, just floating. What happens when w e die?

What happens when we die is we wake u p through birth. Everyone dies simultaneously.

AWARCHY FOR M E MASSES

The timesuit takes Robin into the supercontext, where she is reunited with King Mob in 2012?

Yep. The supercontext is where we all end up. Is it where we all come from as well? Is this what w e are trying to remember?

You're right. That's how it would be from their perspective. From their perspective, we're individualized. It's kind of the Buddhist idea of when raindrops fall, they think of themselves as raindrops. Every one of them's [saying], "Oh my god! We're all raindrops! Isn't this amazing!" And the ocean goes, "Fuck!" It was that feeling. That would be the feeling of the supercontext from our point of view, and for some people that dissolution into a higher absolute reality would mean ultimate terror. They would have to go through a phase of ultimate terror. Or for people who had prepared for it, they would be prepared for it like Buddhists are prepared for death, or the witch would be prepared for death, using whatever symbol system they had to to make it a pleasant experience or was actually to try and break a horrific experience. The point of THEINVISIBLES away, kind of sum it up and say you can have the unpleasant and pleasant experiences together, because the Outer Church will come for you. The Outer Church just represents the experience of existential horror at the fringes of the human personality. It's where we stop, where everything that is not-us starts to move in. It wants to erase our personalities, it wants to take over. It's stuff outside, is about embracing a higher reality, and and stuff we're afraid of. THEINVISIBLES the higher reality of the supercontext doesn't differentiate. In the higher reality of the supercontext, evil will be [present] as a necessary inoculation, which allows the developing larva to experience bad feelings and integrate them into itself. I've come to the conclusion that the world is tested through activations. I've been influenced by Terrence McKenna's timewave theory. I saw these activations. I began to see that the Dark Ages was a kind of huge dark night of the soul for that period of history. But then the second World War was a much more condensed and compressed dark night of the soul for humanity at large. I think we keep going through these initiated experiences, which is the moon experience from the tarot card, which is good through darkness. Through the worst experience, actually the darkness is just some part of light. The two things define each other. Darkness and light are just things on a spectrum. Good and evil are on a spectrum, they're on a line. The supercontext is way out past that line. It and the spectrum are opposite existences, they're opposite ways of being. The all-engulfing sensation of becoming an adult in a higher dimension. Do you believe in a literal supercontext?

My own experiences, my own actual apparent contacts with these things is utterly convincing. I can't prove it, and it would be insane to try to say that it's the truth, but as far as I'm concerned I'm completely convinced. I've no fears that this is what will happen when I die. I can contact these states before we die - magick is about


that, and meditation is about that. The dissolution of evil is where that state begins. If w e can d o that in our life, we're ready for it when we die. Imagine the experience of I a m not a n individual, I a m connected to eveything, including evey bug and evey amoeba. I can feel their beating wings somewhere over there. I can feel my thousand eyes. Fuck, what am I? For some, that's the nightmare of the Outer Church, the nightmare of the discarded timesuit. But actually it's just life. The timesuit is just all biological life, twisted, seen as an evolutionary line. THEINVISIBLES is also concerned with conspiracy. Do you think government conspiracies are intentional, or the result of unconscious biases and influences?

I think it's everything. It's foolish to say all conspiracy theories are ridiculous. You have to face the fact that if you get a bunch of powerful people together in a room, they will conspire to keep power in whatever way that is necessary. They will conspire against us if we threaten that power. I conspire. Mark Millar and I conspire to write comics that we know will sell in two years, because we know what direction pop music will take, and what direction pop culture will take, so if we write this thing we know that's going to be successful. It tends to work that way. So of course people conspire. But I don't believe in the kind of overarching super Illuminati lizard conspiracy like David Icke wrote. It's a beautiful, Biblical model of history, but it reeks to me of schizophrenia. I think there are conspiracies everywhere. But there are conspiracies against those conspiracies, and conspiracies within them. People are always trying to stab each other in the back, or help each other out to be helped out in the future. The weakness of conspiracy theory is that human nature is to fuck up.

Yeah, of course! I said that in THEINVISIBLES, the idea that no matter how many surveillance cameras you put up, the guy in the surveillance screen room is jerking off. He's not watching; he's playing computer games and looking at some magazine or whatever it is he's doing. You don't have to worry about it. I think we live in a self-perfecting system and we just don't know it. Everything is fine. It's working perfectly; just let it correct itself, and d o what you can to help it correct itself when you become aware of it. Isn't that a justification for apathy?

It only looks like apathy. It's why Buddhist monks seem apathetic to us. I think it's because they've figured it out. But it's the kind of system that perfects itself. Even if you become apathetic, there's always someone else who'll come up who hasn't reached that stage yet and will d o all of that. All those people who tie themselves to trees. They make people think about things they might not have thought about yet. Ultimately they change things. But they, too, will just go on to say okay, I did that, I tied myself to a tree, but even if I hadn't, the world would have produced someone who would have tied themselves to a tree. It always does. There's never a year when no policemen are born. There's never a year when no doctors are born. It's so obviously a system, and we can't see it because


we're so uptight of our individuality within it. To actually watch it correcting itself, learning from its mistakes ... It learns long and hard, but it does it slowly but surely and works its way through what seem to me to be fairly obviously developmental stages. You can see civilizations move through it, and they slip back, but they always come back. Kids g o through the same stages. Everything maps itself. It's so simple. It's one organism, and everything absolutely repeated, which is what the Hermetic axiom was: As above, so below. The gothic inagical formula. Everything is part of it. It's a fractal. Every hologram, every bit of it contains the rest of it, which is why we can work magic. It's simple. We live in a very simple construction. In the series, you use different religious and mythological models to talk about this, including the modern alien abduction mythology.

Well, I saw them all as the same thing. I'd also had this experience. The interesting thing is I drove the experience. I wanted it to happen all my life. When I was a kid I used to sit on the roof and check for flying saucers. Did it happen then? Does it work backwards in time? Was I interested back then because of what happened? Did I write about these things up until the event because I was getting shockwaves moving in all directions in time? Or did I make it happen because I wanted it? Who the fi~ckknows? I went to Kathmandu and this thing just happened on the last day when we were there. I was with a friend. I'll describe it in another book, so I don't really want to go too much into it. [FortuneHotel, edited by Sarah Campion, contains an account of the period around Grant's abduction experience.] But we were stalked. We were really out of our faces all the week, and obviously people will just say, "You were on drugs." I'd spent an entire ten years on drugs. I knew when I was tripping. A lot of people who don't take drugs assume that if you're on LSD the whole world is dancing around like an Alice in Wonderland cartoon. But it's not; what happens is the world around you takes on extra significance and extra symbolic meaning and potency. So generally, unless you're massively high, a car is still a car. It might look like the car of the gods or the car of the devil. A car is still a car, and you know what it is.

But this became something quite different. I wasn't on LSD, or DMT or mushrooms. It was Afghanistan hash, basically the kind of thing that would give you a dreamy afternoon in the sun in Kathmandu. We climbed Swayambunath, which is a British shrine. It's supposed to be one of the most holy places in the world. Any devotion performed here is 19 billion times more efficacious than anywhere. I thought, %at's apret(ygood number! There's a hundred, a thousand stairs there, I forget how many. If you climb them all at once you're promised enlightenment in this life. So me and my friend went over. We were into this stuff in the '90s, you know, ambient albums and smoking dope and just chilling out. Everybody was loosening up and getting more psychedelic because the culture was starting to get on. We went, just getting into the whole vibe of [UK techno group] The Shamen and all that kind of stuff. We did it. We ran up the stairs, no problem. So obviously something was primed for it to happen. I'd started THEINVISIBLES, I'd done the bungee jump. I'd kind of set in motion this thing. I'd begun to write


about people having initiations and alien abductions. THEINVISIBLES I guess, the whole thing is an initiation. It's an initiation for the readers, an initiation for the writer, for every character that's involved. And I'd had some little magical initiations from doing ritual magick all these years. Suddenly, this is like the real thing. On top of this roof garden, the whole reality skewed out. I was lying on a bed and these things appeared, which were kind of what [the magic mirror was1 during the love-love-love sequence in THEINVISIRLES - you see two silver blobs interacting. These things came into the room and were kind of interpenetrating the substance of the room, moving in and out of it. They kind of said they were going to explain stuff to me. I said, "What d o you bloody want?" And they said, "Well, where d o you want to go?" I said, "What are you talking about?" They said, "We can take you anywhere in the universe. Where do you want to go?" And I said, "Alpha Centauri." It was the first thing I could think of, as you would. Suddenly - I can't explain it - the room just collapsed, went in on itself. It was like Stargate stuff, really strange. Then it was like I was in real space, an actual experience of being in space. There were three suns, and this huge planetary surface that was blue and green. You could get stuff like that, I'm sure, on a really extreme mushroom trip. It was a very intense visualization, but I couldn't see anything else. The rest of the world wasn't getting in. They took me down to this planet, and lots of weird kind of stuff happened. They showed me these forms of life that looked like moving neon tubes. And then I said, "What is this?" And they said, "We're going to take you right out now. We're going to show you now. Get ready for this." And they took me off of space-time. I looked back, and I could see everything falling away, but it was like Shakespeare's just over there, and the dinosaurs are around the corner from him, but you can see them. I started to see it seething, and how it was interlinked and it was seeping in on itself. I don't know how to describe it. What it seemed to me was like being taken off the surface of three space dimensions and one time dimension. And then I was completely, "Of course!" Eureka! I was surrounded by these entities, which were like the blob-things. There were little bits coming off them, silvery kind of structures, and I was one of them, because I could see myself reflected in it. And suddenly everything was clear. It was amazing. I said, "Can we go back? Can we go back in?" I could see a nursery of universes. I said, "How d o you d o this? What is this?" And they said, "We play in here." I was in some kind of huge, expansive space, and they moved through it the way you would imagine whales would move through the ocean. It seemed to be enclosed, but also infinite. You could see it was filled with lattices of light, and they said it was an information space. It was a medium of pure information they could get interactive with.

ANARCHY FOR THE W E 5

I tried to say, "What's that all about?" And they said, "Well, we play in there." They said next time I could be the mother and you could be the other person. There was also a baby, but they played in the baby and taught it stuff. I'm trying to explain this. A lot of it I don't have; a lot of it was just what is in the comic and nothing more. They explained to me how you make one, and I detached a. part of myself and kind of plugged it into this information space we were in, and it began to grow. And they said, "That's how you make a universe, and it's how you play in one." And I said, "What?" The thing started to grow, and it completely surrounded me. And then there was this huge weight and BANG!I'm back in my body. This is a truncated version, it was a lot more detailed. I was completely shattered. I felt like I had actually been shown the structure of reality. I was utterly convinced. Why you?

Because at the time I think everyone was getting it. I think why Terrence McKenna, whose experiences I then read? I got through and thought, Fuck! Silvery beingsfrom thejiyth dimension! I read every book on abductions I could get. I realized that these people were having the same thing, but interpreted differently. And then I read everything about shamanism, and I thought, well, the whole shamanic experience is that you're taken away and dissected and you're returned to Earth with a stone in your head. The exact same as an abduction experience. And I was looking at satanic abuse cases, and the fairy abductions of the seventeenth century, and they were all reporting the same thing. I think loads of people in the '90s, it seemed to be a really popular time for abduction. The alien icon started to appear everywhere. Something was going on. I don't think it was just me. I think it's why the culture started producing more psychedelic energy. Films like i%e Matrix and ads that looked like surrealist films. Something got in. I'm utterly sure something got in. I've read everything. I've read Philip K Dick, who had the same experience. His is almost even closer to mine. I think his and McKenna's are the ones I most resonate with. I don't know if it's aliens. I think they've always been with us, which leads me to think it might just be a human developmental potential is opening up, in the same way a kid gets to seven and suddenly understands perspective, whereas you cannot explain it to a kid of five, he doesn't have the structure to cope with it. Or explaining something to a kid who's flooded with hormones at 14 that you could easily explain to him when he was 13. We know there are different stages. We know that babies g o through different stages growing up. My current deconstructionist view is that it might just be a peek at a developmental stage, and a lot of people have been getting it recently, so it's becoming more popular. Maybe the drugs are helping, maybe the drugs are opening it, because the drugs seem to kind of facilitate a kind of superconducting thinking that is more inclusive. I don't think it's aliens. Maybe there is. Maybe there is just other dimensions. That could be just as real. But in terms of your experiential thing on Earth, it


seems interesting to assume that it might be just the brain opening up. Is that our future fate? A lot of the stuff we've been talking about, I keep getting it corroborated. I put it in THEINVISIRLES in Volume 3, the bit where King Mob discovers this article by Michael Grady. I'd just seen this in New Scientist that week. Michael Grady's this little left-field physicist who was taking it more seriously. He started to suggest that there was data to support that the universe is a crystal, time and space is a crystal growing out in an information fluid in five-dimensional space. I'm reading that and going, "Fuck!" Things were starting to get like that all the time on THEINVISIBLES. In New Scientist this week, there's an article about time travel. They said because they've learned to slow light down to a crawl, if they can put it in a tubular shape, apparently inside the tube, time becomes space. So you can walk into a tube and walk backwards in t h e . The interesting thing is this is why we're not getting visited by people in the future, because you can only come back to the point when the device is switched on.

If w e accept that humanity is a developmental stage, what's the point of anything that happens now? The point is to have fun and be very creative, it seems to me. If you get to be creative, it seems to be more and more fun. Being god if you want to. A lot of people don't have any fun, because [fun is an1 imposition. I used to feel that way. is about taking all those conditions off, to even see them, to Doing THEINVISIBLES even notice that you've put these roles on. Why are people so afraid of breaking down the conditions? Why do you think things like drugs are so demonized, even to the point of banning medicinal uses of things like marijuana?

They're frightened that the world might fall apart. But actually we might be cooler, we'd like each other better. The buses might not run o n time, but so what? They don't run on time in Fiji or Barbados, and everybody seems pretty cool and happy. But I think it threatens our dominant entertainment speed culture. As I've said in Invisibles letter columns, I'm always pointing out things that drive me mad. That coffee's tolerated in huge quantities. In fact, you must work on coffee. You should be taking this intense stimulant in the morning just after you've got u p to enable you to work. It's safe to stock the shelves with stress packs and things to stop headaches. The whole culture's driven by sugar and speed and anything that will make people work faster and obey these ridiculous seventeenth century mill owner's time schedules. Why don't people work at night? It's different outside the West. Thailand operates on 'Thai time,' which basically means things get done when things get done. Stress is a foreign concept.

That's what I saw in Fiji. I remember waiting for the bus, and people were just, "Oh, Fiji time." In Thailand - exactly the same. Just wait for the thing. Look at the sky. Inevitably the bus turns up. We need to break that.. . Clocks and schedules. Speed. I think the fear is that it will all fall apart. The schedules will fall apart if people smoke dope or take psychedelics. It hasn't stopped Alan Moore!


How do you combine ethics with magick? If THEINVISIBLES is a spell to create Invisibles, or open up peoples'thinking, how much does that interfere with free will?

I just don't believe in free will. I'm part of an organizing system, and I'll just d o what I feel I've been impelled to do. Maybe I'm abdicating free will. Free will is just maximizing insanity. I remember Timothy Leary handing out acid, but whether that's socially good or not I don't know. To me, I think it is. It think it accelerates development. It causes problems in other areas, but the developmental acceleration always deals with the problems. I'm inclined to push it. I can't necessarily be trusted. I'm not Gandhi. I'm just a guy who writes stuff. What I think is that at least the stuff I'm pushing writes me out of it as any sort of figurehead or guru. If you look at the Barbelith board, most of them hate me. People don't want to be following any leader, and I think that's great. A lot of people just d o their own thing. We should get rid of that feeling that there are leaders or gurus. I want to see other people doing their comics and inspiring me. I don't want to see people doing my comic back at me. You d o want people to pay attention, but what they should be paying attention to most is about this thing. Don't trust us; judge what you think. Try to experience it. It drives me mad if I talk to people about magic and they say, "Oh, that's absolute bullshit." And I say, "If you honestly d o this, you'll probably get an effect." "Nah, I'm not doing that. It's just hullshit." Most people are still scared. It's just hangover from two thousand years of Judeo-Christian monolithic culture. Five hundred years ago they would have killed me for doing what I'm doing. It's why magic became so occult and so surrounded by ritual and symbol. It should actually be stripped back to what it is; it's a basic imagination technology. I don't know how it works, but it seems to work. There's something to d o with recognizing the similarity in all the structures within the universe and working with the similarities to make things happen. The world has done enough of it to prove it works. But try telling people. All you're saying is d o it and see what happens. If you're poor, use magick and get rich; see what happens. You might hate being rich. Have you had any scary experiences with magick?

Yeah, I've had terrible experiences. Part of my illness I think had to d o with it. As Jill said, there was probably a big kickback of energy from the wankathon. At the same time, I was doing some deals with scorpion loa, the ones from the Jim Crow story, and it really got out of hand. I think part of my sickness was being stung by contact with these energies, or whatever they were, and that was really freaky. There were things that will never be described until I write it as an autobiography, but really strange events. Insectile, sick encounters. There's a lot of bad stuff. I always went for the edge. I thought if you were going to summon anything up, make it one of Lovecraft's monsters and then deal with it. It was a way of training the imagination. All monsters can be defeated if you figure out how. Doing stuff like JLA taught me a lot about magick. I use superheroes in


magick, because superheroes always win. So if you conjure something or encounter something out of hand, bring in Superman and say, "Hey man, there's the problem. How d o we defeat it?" The superheroes work it out. That's all they exist for, to defeat enemies. I find that it's a good symbolic system to use in magick, because they can always find the thing's weakness, talk it down or trick it or d o anything. They're there, whether they're just forces from your own unconscious, because they're really scary, personalized nightmare figures or sensations of bad feelings - the worst day on Earth. Do you believe things like the scorpion loa are independent entities out there in the universe or manifestations of ourselves?

Well, the story with them is I was interested in Voodoo. I wanted to bring in the Jim Crow character and I wanted to be honest about Voodoo. So I thought, Well, I better t y this and see what this feels like. I knew it was quite savage; Voodoo is bloody and kind of primitive and it doesn't give a fuck. These are brutal gods. They have their artistic, clever, funny, weird sides, but they're pretty brutal, let's face it. I wasn't into the blood thing. I just contacted them. I didn't even know what I was trying to deal with, but they came through as these scorpion things. They were trying to teach me psychic martial arts. It's in THEINVISIBLES as King Mob learns to rip off people's auras. They were trying to say, "We'll show you how to rip off a human aura. That leaves them completely unprotected against astral forces, and then you can destroy them." It was bad. I felt, "This is really bad. It was bad, bad stuff that I don't want to know, and they're going to get angry." And you don't want to make these forces angry. They insisted that I get a tattoo of a scorpion at the base of my spine. I dealt with them later on, because I used Jim Crow. Once I was thinking about how I could use the comic as magick, and use the figures in it as totems and allies, I began to work with the scorpions. But this initial encounter was really strange. I came out of it feeling quite sick, like something bad just happened and I shouldn't have dealt with it that way. I turned on the 'Ilr and it was Howard the Duck. I don't know if you've seen Howard the Duck, but these fucking scorpions come from another dimension and they looked almost exactly like what I'd seen. They were like scorpions with bodies upright at the front and a weird, almost human head. It was too much. So then I got this book I'd been searching for by Michael Bertiaux, the Voudon Gnostic Workbook. I was reading through that, and it's one of the most bizarre, impossible, schizoid kind of reads. If you can persist with it, it's like reading JG Ballard or something. But I get to this whole thing where he's talking about the families that are attached to Guedhe, who's the death loa, who as a character seems to be pretty interesting and decent. But there are some really sinister ones, kind of the left-hand path. The zombie master, the really dark side, the unpleasant stuff. There are entire insect families of loa. And suddenly I'm reading about how there's a scorpion family, scorpion loa. Baron Zaraguin and his family, Ti-Zaraguin and the kids. They govern the base of the spine. And then it's all this other stuff, and, "This is how they might appear." And I said, "Oh, for fuck's sake!" After that I was sick. I was sick for a year and in hospital.

ANARCHY FOR THE MATrES

The deal I made later was to say to the scorpions, is I said, "What I'll d o for you" and this is the deal I usually make with spirits - "is I'll put you in the comic. I'll make you more real. People will believe in you. This gives you a context." I also did that with my illness. There's a bit in issue five of the countdown, the last year of THE INVISIRLES, where King Mob is talking about translating an illness into text as a method of defeating illness. And when I was dying of the staphyllococcus infection, that's what I decided to do. I thought, "1'11 write it into the text as a cosmic villain. I'll make you bigger if you spare my life. I will make you the biggest thing there is, the ultimate cosmic destroyer that's eating away the planet. 1'11 give you a huge significance if you let me go. Spare me and 1'11 make you a star!" I made a shamanic bargain with the illness, with the animal, the actual spirit of the staphylococcus bug. It's one of the most lethal killers in the world, I later found out. I survived it. I feel that it's an ally. Why didn't you want to die if you'd already seen the other side?

I was terrified. I just thought, "I've not done my shit yet. I've not finished THE INVISIBLES; I've not finished JUSTICE LEAGUEOF AMERICA." I knew it wasn't right. They told me that if I'd been taken in a day later I'd have been dead. So I was pretty far gone. I was hallucinating. I saw Jesus come in, and that's when I decided I didn't want to die. My mum was upstairs, she was cleaning the cats' boxes. This was the very last night of two weeks of fever. I'd been diagnosed wrong and there'd been a lot of very weird circumstances. Strange, interlocking events, like getting this other doctor, who diagnosed me instantly and got me in a hospital, which saved my life. The night before, I was lying there and this column of light came in the room. Bear in mind I'd been hallucinating, so I thought it was the greatest hallucination ever. Again, there's bits of it in THEINVISIBLES. And it was Christ. It was this Gnostic, kind of savage little brooding bastard. It started off with that thing that's in THEINVISIBLES: I a m not the God of your fathers. I a m the hidden stone that breaks all hearts. He went into this monologue and I was running in tears. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard. I wish I'd had a tape recorder and got it all down. That happened, and he said, "You get this choice. You can use your work to spread the light, or you can die." And I thought, "No, I fancy staying on." THEINVISIULES Volume 2 came out of that. How can you sell the light, whatever that is? Is that why you brought Satan back into the story?

Yeah, I had to deal with it. I was having these experiences, and it all seemed to be part of THEINVISIBLES, or to color themes in THEINVISIBLES, or to feed back in. Everything became inextricable. It was a really strange thing. As I explained before, once I knew what was happening, I could make myself deal with it; I could have abduction experiences or anything. I decided to make King Mob have a really good time. I would meet these women who looked liked Ragged Robin all the time; it was really strange. And I would g o out with them but terrible things would happen, and it was really wrong for me. It taught me a lot about using magick. The great tip about sex magick or love magick is always enchant for what you need rather than what you want, and you will d o well. If


you d o it for what you want, it's terrible. Writing him a good life led into stuff manifesting in my life. I realized what you could d o with comics and magick. That's when I developed the idea of a hypersigil, which is an extended sigil that would actually involve your own life, and transform it as part of the work. You could write you into it and it would happen in your life. I wrote the whole thing for King Mob in the last issue to see if I could do it, sell games and things. See if I could actually make it happen. It makes sense. It works. People think, "Well, why has it been suppressed all these years?" And I say, "Well, because any time you mention it people laugh." Nobody wants to talk about it. I think we're conditioned not to believe in anything. I didn't believe in magick until I actually tried a sigil, and it worked. Some guy decides to write a book, and suddenly the doors open up. Everybody he calls decides to talk with him. I wound up here in your home. It works.

It does. I've had all kinds of remarkable results from magick. I'm sure Jill told you the cat incident. I had a ginger cat in here. I cured him. He had cancer all through him. It was '97. It was a weird time. It was me coming out of my dark time, and THEINVISII~LES was about all that plague shit in '97. I just felt invulnerable after the abduction and surviving death. I'd gone really inflated and messianic at the time; I felt anything could happen. But that cat was dying. Someone taught me the spiritual healing method, the laying on of hands. I had light coming off my hands and everything. I loved the cat so much. We picked him up and the vet said, "We can't find any tumors at all," even though they'd diagnosed him the day before. And I was talking to Jill on the phone and she said, "It worked." Something is going on. We don't have a good model, we don't have things to explain it. So I'm always interested in the mad theories. Is there a fifth dimension? How would its energies emerge? How would we see things that happened? How would we interact? Do you think that 3,000 years of government and religion have robbed people of the ability to think for themselves?

No, because we're doing it. Obviously not. Anyone who thinks for themselves just makes other people think for themselves probably. Again, I see it now as a development process. I'm quite convinced by the Ken Wilber model. I'm not a fan of structures or hierarchical setups, but he's got quite a beautiful structure for explaining developmental processes that seem to cover a lot of different systems. I like his scales and his structure, because things seem to work within them. It's probably a good little workbook for however many years we've got as at least a model to talk about certain things that may be happening. I think we're just passing through all the different stages we need to, the way a baby is born and it lives in this sort of maternal bliss state where everything is provided for. It's unindividuated. Everything is there for it. The universe exists for its pleasure, the garden of Eden we all longingly look back towards. Slowly as the child individuates, it begins to define itself as an individual, which is quite a shock. And individuals then begin to claim territory, because they want space in which they exist as individuals, and that's when the self/not-self boundary is


suddenly erected, which we have so much trouble getting by in our culture. We just progress through it, and cultures d o as well. Territorial babies are the same as the great territorial empires. At first they want to tame chaos, because the chaos existed before. It was the baby state of the garden of Eden, where we were just all savages living off whatever we could eat. The world provided for us. If it rained it was for us; if there was lightning it was to scare us. That's the same in primitive cultures. Then you get to the rational stage of an adolescent beginning to define its own identity through ideas or through style, which corresponds to the rational enlightenment stage, where, "No, there is no magick. We stand for science and a new way of thinking." That in itself reaches limits. The limit of that lies again in boundaries, walls, ideological conflicts, existential terror. If the sovereign soul dies up there, then we die at this point. We have this fear, which is the existential movement. But beyond that there is actually non-existential selves, there is beyond self. I think these developmental stages probably work, and I think we should trust the process a bit more, but try to help the process. Once you're aware of these, you're doing everything you can to help it along. When you talk about how long w e have left, do you mean until 2012?

Well, it would be interesting. Obviously that's McKenna's date, which enchanted me, and also the end date for the Mayan calendar. I think McKenna was on to something. I think he's still on target. Things are developing as fast and as accelerated as he predicted. So he might be right. It'd be pretty cool if it were real. THEINVISIBLES never hid its many influences: Philip K Dick, Doctor Who, Jason King, The Prisoner, Illuminatus! and so many more. What do you feel you've given back?

Basically my experience, in the same way that Philip K Dick used his experience. This is my version of it. It's always the same search for the Holy Grail. This is just another person in a new generation. I'm really aware of that. I think this is the same story that's been told constantly by what has always been seen as counterculture or rebel elements in culture at any given time. It's the story of struggle against overwhelming, crushing structure. About liberation, about freedom and creativity. Obviously a group of people are going to keep telling it. Romantics are going to keep telling it. I think it's my version of it. And given that there've been so many different versions, what if it's true? It's another voice that says what if this shit works? Just remember I've tried it and it worked, and here's how it worked for me. I strained it through a filter of having grown up with those TV shows you

mentioned, all those influences like the Illuminatus! and through my own life as someone who was into music and being in bands and meeting certain types of people and going to clubs. And through science fiction, which to me seems to make sense of the world. A Ballard, Moorcock kind of glossy, sexy scifi take on the world. It cheered me up in Thatcher's Britain to think of myself as Jerry Cornelius, to wear those clothes and be in a band. I found that you can actually cheer things u p by pretending to be things. And the more I realized it worked I knew it was magick, as well. I think THEINVISIBLES gives that.


You can be anything. You can be King Mob; you can be Lord Fanny; you can be Jack Frost. You can actually assume these roles and test them out, test drive different human potentials but realize then that you, too, are only one of those potentials. It ends with these ideas about discarding the dualistic self and the MeMePlex, which is a sort of compound self, the multiple-personality self. If you go in to it they won't be mollified. Mister Six is probably the best example of this in THEINVISIBLES. I think he became the self-image in the book. As you know, I began to discard King Mob. I thought he was a better self-image for a man approaching his forties than King Mob was. I saw that and he became Jason King because it was cool. So I became Jason King as well, just to see what it's like. It works. He's a great one, because Jason King's a writer as well. You play with that earlier with King Mob's Kirk Morrison books.

me Killing Moon is actually a book I wrote when I was 25. It was my first horror novel. It was about a werewolf. It was pretty good, but it was never published. I never finished it. It was about 100 pages shy of the end. It was one of those 700page Stephen King things. There were a lot of good ideas in it. Were you consciously trying to push the envelope with the sex and violence in Volume 2 or did it develop organically?

It was there. I started it off with the cunnilingus sequence because I thought we hadn't seen enough of that. I was getting sick of Howard Chaykin showing a blow job as much as a left hand. We never really got that. I just wanted to extend King Mob into that sex god area, and also I was playing with that stuff in my life. I was trying to live the James Bond life and do all that and see what it was like, and it was kind of strange for me. I wanted to do what I was seeing in the movies and then push it, because you could push it in comics and then critique it completely. When you finally get to the autocritique, the Situationist attack on the Invisibles, exposing its hidden racist or establishment agenda, it turns out they do serve the status quo. It's just a bunch of guys dressed up in a stereotyped image rebellion. Lord Fanny means nothing. To show again you mean something if you decide to mean something, if you choose to mean something. But the critique is still there, it's still sound. The anarchist figure, the hero, is just a projection, which stops us from being heroic in our own life. Phil Jimenez said there were words you couldn't say. You couldn't say "orgasm."

I never knew that. No, that's not true. He made that up! Maybe he's not allowed to have an orgasm. It's a comic. We can say anything. I was never stopped from saying anything, except "cunt" or using the names of public figures, which became a real fight in the end. They were starting to black them out in the text. That wasn't any kind of post-modern kind of trope. That was me actually being edited out.

ANARCHY FOR M E MASSES

Spin offs? Is the world ready for a DIVISIONX miniseries?

I've thought about all these things, but I don't know if I shouldn't let them lie. I want to d o a King Mob thing. How much of the second de Sade story came out of your experiences with Reichian therapy?

All of it. I just began to understand it. For me at least, and it seems to be echoed in a lot of other things I've read, the only way through was through the shit. You have to deal with the worst aspects of yourself constantly. You have to work with the ugliest sex fantasies or the ugliest fantasies of violence and revenge, the way that you can think about other people, and the things you d o to yourself. It's a scouring perspective. That's what it was about. I thought people had to go through that. An initiation, confrontation of the dark side, dreams and the chaotic side. It was absorbing more of that, integrating more of that into the comic as psychotherapy. It was an upgrade for me, taking o n ideas that were so appalling and turning them into poetry. Part of what I'm doing in THE FILTHhas to d o with that. I thought I'd trawl through Internet porn, and I thought, That's real social histo y stufJ Assaults on everything we hold dear, that's what porn's about. That's society's toilet, that's where the shit's getting flushed away. And I saw all this stuff you could work with, and turn it into poetry. Make people laugh at the things that terrify them, or things that become nightmarish or taboo. You've said you think Volume 2 is the purist form of THEINVISIBLES.

I think so. It's just the sexiest, you know? Phil was brilliant in the Face of adversity, and Chris was great. When he did it, it was starting to corrupt. So his more biological renderings were perfect for the energies of the fragment of the supercontext embedded in this underground city. It was incredible. All that weird biological stuff, the timesuit. That was great. Chris was getting to the point where the whole thing was disintegrating. King Mob's having a nervous breakdown, kicking down doors and running nowhere. I was at the end of my tether. What was this series about? What am I getting to? And every time, it would break open again, give me some new idea, new insight. And still, I don't have that same intensity doing the things that I do. You've addressed this already, but a lot of people think that Ragged Robin is Crazy Jane from DOOM PATROL.

Well, she is. She's THEINVISIRLES' universe version of Kay Challis, who is, in the DC universe, Crazy Jane. It is part of the whole DC Hypertime. I like to link everything up. I felt ecstatic when I had the brainwave of making King Mob Gideon Stargrave, and linking my very first teenage work with the work I was doing at the time. It was just a way of tying everything in. There's loads of references to everything else I've done in THEINVISIBLES; there's characters who appear that might have appeared in other things, and BARBELiTH appears in a story way back in a comic called Al. There's lots of little links to everything. I tried


to deliberately do that, because it was a summing up of everything I'd done in the past, as well as the thing it was on its own. How much were the characters changed from your initial ideas for the series and the first issue?

Quite a lot. Robin was originally called Raggedy Ann, which fit the makeup better, obviously, and presented these doll-like qualities. I always knew that was there. I wanted her to be a bit more rounded as a woman; she could also incorporate elements of weakness. Comic guys are afraid, they're always trying so hard to make strong women. I wanted her to be dodgy sex fantasies, or she could be weak as a well as strong. She could get things wrong. I wanted to give her a bit of scope. But I think Raggedy Ann would have made as good a name. To be honest, Ragged Robin was just something I found in Brewer's, where I found most of the names. I just thought, What a m Igoing to do now? I can't do this doll-like Raggedy Ann thing. I found that in the seventeenth century these young women were called Ragged Robin if they painted their faces and wore their hair in plaits. It was a default, to be honest, but it grew to suit her more in the end. What is Robin - a boy's name? Is it a girl's name? And it has that comic book connection. I think it's a better name. Did you deliberately link her makeup to the bureaucrats in 120 Days of Sod AIR

Yeah, because she's a victim, as well. She's the pin of it all. Ragged Robin's a complex figure. I think that's why a lot of women like the character. There's a lot going on in there. A lot of people and a lot of personalities kind of fade into making the characters come to life. She was the lynch pin of it. At the same time, she's the victim of the entire experiment. She's the one who gets put in the timesuit and sent back, and forced to endure stresses beyond any known human being. So she's always the victim. She chose to be the victim, as well. She processed being a victim into being the savior of the entire universe, in the same way that Fanny did. It seems like the entire team has their moment as the savior of the universe aside from Boy.

Well, Boy is, too. She lets herself go into the cycle of life, which everyone seems to find difficult. Did you put Fanny and Jack in MARVEL BOY?

It was actually the artist, but that is what they'd want to do. That was just a perfect synchronicity. THEINVISIBLES is a story within a story...

The entire story is being told by Jack to Gaz. We see that early on. He's actually telling him everything the reader experiences. The reader is being Gaz as the story's being unfolded, who is the most wretched, most hopeless character, but yet dies in a glorious way.


And it's also being written by Robin. And it's also being written by Kirk Morrison, and Grant Morrison. There were people getting in touch with me. There was a girl who sent me her own version of things, and that sort of fed into it. It'd all become alive. Her interpretation of THEINVISIBLES was, What ifRagged Robin wrote the whole thing? What if my readers hijacked the text? Because that's what I wanted them to do. What would it become under someone else's hands? has become more The last issue stems from the point of view where THEINVISIBLES culturally involved than it is just now, and people know about it or whatever. That's written for kids in 2012 who have rejected this entire culture. Today w e have THEINVISIBLES comic; in 2012 they have Shae Fox.

King Mob's behind that one as well. I'm getting into movies. There will probably movie, and it will coincide just in time for a new little twist, with be an INVISIBLES psychedelic kids. Globally aware kids from a giant Internet mind will suddenly understand that this mess is about them. It's programmed to d o that. Issue one should actually be unwrapped and read on the actual moment of 2012 when it's supposed to occur. I think there'll be enough cultural references in there people will recognize based on the way things are going. A lot of people missed the crucial return of Audrey Murray due to coloring discrepancies. How did you feel about the series' coloring, an aspect of comics usually underappreciated?

Most of it was okay. I kind of felt that Danny tended to favor a horribly muted palette. I'd rather the whole thing was Day-Glo all the way through. That didn't work, it wasn't set u p to d o it. I've known Danny for a long, long time. I'm happy with his work. But for me, obviously I see these things in three dimensions in living Technicolor. Any gettable color is never suitable. Bolland's covers got it, and that's about it. Rut the interiors tend to be painted in porridge. How much input did you have on the covers?

Not a lot. I'd comment, but a lot of them he would just d o on his own. I tended to leave him to his own devices on the last volume. The first one is like a Masonic nightmare of that series. Bolland's covers are brilliant. They're like Peter Greenaway movies. You can sit and study them all week. THEINVISIBLES was notorious for its letter column.

They were great. I hated it when they were stopped. I loved them. I had nothing to d o with [their end]. I believe it was actually because the letters pages in THE INVISIBLES, and Garth Ennis' PREACHER and TRANSMETROPOLITAN by Warren Ellis were getting a bit out of control and talking about drugs. I actually think that's why they were stopped. It didn't have anything to d o with space at all. We were saying too much. We were openly admitting to d n ~ gabuse and cannibalism and all kinds of other things. I thought THEINVISIHLES' really was the best. Well they were supposed to be for mature readers ...


"Supposed to be" is the key phrase. I think it was terrible when they did it. It completely undermined a lot of the connection I had with people. And it was part of the spell. I thought, Okay, I'm going to really implicate myself in this comic. I'll tellpeople what's going on in my life and all kinds of stufJ: It got to the point there were people on the Barbelith board getting sick of what they perceived to be my fame. In actual fact they were just mistaking that kind of glamour I made around THEINVISIBLES as real life. I think it's natural, especially with the kind of people I encourage. You want to say, "I don't have any masters, I'm my own man." Even though it's obvious you're influenced by everything. It's adolescent to deny your influences. At the same time, a true master learns from his pupils. I think it's fine. It keeps me humble. Rather than me being the leader of some international gang of idiots, people are becoming their own idiots. They're figuring it out for themselves and moving on. It pains me when I realize that people don't get what I'm doing with it, or why I've been in the media, or why it works a certain way to create a glamour. I wanted THEINVISIRLES to make revolution sexy. It had become wooly and beardy and kind of boring. I wanted it to get really sexy again so people would want to be revolutionary. Baader-Meinhoff - that was the last time it was cool. And then it got tree protectors and crusties and wooly guys tying themselves to redwoods. The idea was to make it shiny and sexy and its like these people are fucking tantric sex gods. They're really cool; they travel internationally with platinum credit cards. To make it actually work. To take over the world and then it's so glamorous that you could have revolution become people's air that they breathe without realizing it. My idea at the end again was to dress revolution in the clothes of MTV and of fashion shoots so that people would absorb it. They'd absorb ideas so toxic and so destructive that it would undermine their normal consensus reality. You've got to sell them the celebrity aspect of your culture, I won't deny it, which is like the Gnostic denial of the flesh. Embrace the Spectacle. Learn how to use it. For me, the BSE scandal and the outcry that happened here with people dying of cattle disease seemed like a great metaphor for revolution. But instead, at the time, most protesters saw it as a way of meeting the police. All these protesters, they want to get off on the police. I don't want to ever have to encounter a policeman in my life, unless we're going drinking together. There are people who want to just engage the police in struggle. There's something S W about that whole view. And of course a main theme of THEINVISIBLES is that we're really all on the same side.

We're all drawn on the same paper. All the characters in THEINVISIBLES were drawn on the same paper. The sooner we just fucking get over it and start realizing it and start working with that, we might be able to achieve that. There's irony in the fact that THEINVISIBLES is a revolutionary tract unwittingly published by A01 Time Warner, the largest media conglomerate in the world.

That has to be the brilliance of it. I began to see that we could be pathogens within the culture. Ideas that actually distort the mind. We know magick and ideas of consciousness evolution change people, change the way you think, change the

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way you experience the world. So if you make them so sexy that the world wants to eat them up - because the Spectacle wants to eat everything that it can sell, and everything it can sell back. Suddenly you get Bum [the Vampire Slayer], and you get 72e Matrix. You get people saying, "I want to be Buffy," or "I want to be like the girls in Charmed. They can make reality happen." And then somebody says you can do it; here's a spellbook dating back thousands of years. We actually have the technology to change your reality. And suddenly a culture that's eaten the bug that it shouldn't have eaten, that bug is rewiring its brain. It's completely changing it. It's dissolving everything that held it together before, because it's more seductive than a culture of sitting in front of the TV and not doing magick and not seizing control of the very atoms of the air around you. If it works - and I'm completely convinced it works - put it in the hands of people who are trapped in boring jobs and give them the opportunity to change everything. Put it in the hands of an idiot. Put it in the hands of scientists. What would happen? So it's becoming a pathogen. The infiltration is to be s o seductive; they want to buy everything; they want to buy your soul. And then they buy your soul and the soul is so toxic it turns them into what we want them to be. How much do corporations and governments use magick? Are some logos actually sigils?

Totally. I think we've overlooked it. Some of them know what they're doing. They've got access to some of the smartest minds on the planet. They're paying some of the cleverist people to develop NLPs, hypnotic strategies, to create fantasy realities s o that w e will buy, buy, buy or partake in these wonderful worlds they're offering. So w e have to know; you've got to defend yourself against people who are trying to exploit your ignorance. Magick is actually so democratic. It's s o communistic in its way, because it empowers everyone. It empowers even the lowest person. I mean, get a Voodoo doll and kill your boyfriend! What happened with the proposed BBC THEINVISIBLES television series?

It died a death. I wrote two [episodes] and really detailed outlines for the rest. I was really pissed. We went all the way through; we were doing really well. [I've put two ofl the scripts on the Web site. They were brilliant. They were quite different from the original. They were based o n the first four issues but really updated, tied into what was going on in British culture. There was some interesting stuff in them. Because they went through a lot of rewrites they were a lot tighter. Jack comes much more across as he really is. The Harmony House stuff is really interesting and tight and it explores it a lot more than it does in the comic. They got all the way u p to this woman in the BBC high command and she just said, "No one will understand what telepathy is." I said, "Right now your biggest show is 7he X Files. These people look at weirder things than telepathy every week!" And she said, "No, I don't get it." It was ridiculous. That was it; it just died. It went around, but nothing's really gone on. There was a movie


deal that almost happened. But the interesting thing is that Richard Metzger's company has picked it up. He did the Disinfo stuff. He understands it, and he's connected to everyone who's into this kind of stuff. He's the kind of spider at the center of the counterculture web. So they've got it, I've sold it to them. I'll be working with them, so I'll be really involved in it. I think it's more likely to be based on stuff from the second volume, the time travel and all this stuff. How would you differentiate an INVISIBLES film from The Matrix?

Well, I thought 7%eMatrix went for a lot of the Volume 1 stuff, so we're going to concentrate on Quimper and breaking into bases and the glamour of anarchy and the sexy life these guys have. The thing is the way you sell it. You send people back to the comic, which will hit them with a real depth charge. The TV show was pretty close. There were a lot of different elements. It was pretty tight - it was better than the comic, I think. I always wanted Daniel Day Lewis as King Mob. He's now aged himself past the role of the early King Mob. We'll just d o it so people won't be able to say [THEINVISIBLES movie is ripped off from 7%eMatrixl, which is a challenge for me. How can w e make things fresh? The characters are sound. The characters are still cool. People .are only catching up with what was counterculture when I was doing it. Things like Fanny are mainstream. Even though the counterculture might be sick of Fannys and sick of bald pierced guys. The mainstream is getting exciting. They're coming over the rocks and finding us under here. Mainstream is fine. I want it game, the utterly to infect a lot more. I want the game. I want the INVISIBLES immersive 300-player game. I want to see if I can actually d o what's in the comic. It's that grandiose. My magical ambition with the whole thing was that ambitious. Do you think you'll always be identified with THEINVISIBLES?

It seems to be. It's horrible to think I've done my greatest-ever project. Something like THEFILTHseems to me like the way Mask of the Illuminatus would stand to the Illuminatus! trilogy, which is as "That's obviously Morrison's download. He's had the contact and is making the download, and everything else kind of spins off it." But if that was my download, that was the abduction moment, and everything else relates to it or plays off it or refers to it until I get another one. Because THE INVISIBLES was SO channeled, so downloaded, there were lots of things that got one mention and then the next minute it's on to something else. It was it like Aleister Crowley "receiving" i%e Book of the Law.It's just, "Fuck! I've got to get this down, get it down, get it down before the transmission stops." I can come back to it. There are things that are just so outrageous. There are elements that can be expanded, directions to move in. There's n o end to it for me. The next stuff is coming off it. That was the comet that hit me. The X-MENis exactly the same. It's a bunch of guys with weird powers out to change to world, make it better, make it more inclusive and more diverse and more creative, with forces of oppression against them.


How do you feel looking back on the series now that you've moved on?

It was kind of what I hoped. I expected it to be bigger. I expect it still will be bigger. It was written for people in the future. The people who got it are few and far between. People argue over it. But that's what I wanted. I wanted it to be like fie Prisoner or Twin Peaks, constantly in debate, which is why I kind of hate to nail down what I felt when I was writing. That makes it real then; it loses the element of interpretation. THE INVISIBLES is poetic. I think people sometimes misunderstand it. They talk about plot points and miss the fact that it has more to d o with music than films or storytelling. BARBELiTH speaks in emotional aggregates; that's what a song is, or a dance is.

Exactly. A line explains everything and your heart will break, because it's set to the right combination of chords. I forget what the quote is: All art aspires towards the condition of music. And it does. Music is so abstract, but it can encapsulate any human emotion. I was always driving towards that. The plot was a constant annoyance to me. I wanted to have the freedom of William Burroughs, to just go abstract. In the end I think the plot made it more real, it brought it down and anchored it to reality. Why are people like Sir Miles so afraid of the supercontext?

Because they're not aware of it. They don't understand what it is. They stop at the point of the Outer Church. They experience the Outer Church and think they've encountered total reality. But the Outer Church is really just a little part. Sir Miles is actually quite a tragic figure in the whole thing, because he's like King Mob; he's like all of them. He's a beatnik; he's an experimental; he's an explorer. But he encounters the dark side, and becomes convinced that he can't go any further. He's trapped. They create the legend of anti-Masonry to confound him, the idea that the foundation stone of the universe is a block of anti-matter and everything's crushing down on him into a hole. He's different to people like Fanny, who have been brutalized to the point of no return, but passed through it. Or King Mob, or Jack, Dane, whoever. They've all gone beyond the Outer Church experience, integrated it and gone into a kind of supercontext experience where they see the Outer Church, the darkness, as a soil. It grows the beautiful flower of the supercontext. But Sir Miles never gets to BARBELiTH, and if he sees BARBELiTH, BARBELiTH's a thing to obey or destroy. John-A-Dreams keeps coming back into the game, doesn't he?

The white suit. Always look for the white suit. He's the midwife. He's helping the baby along, reminding it what's happening. Every time he keeps waking it u p and saying, "You're soon to be born, you're soon to be born." He gets closer all the time until he finally reveals what's going on. What's the difference between him and the Gnostic Christ figure, the chess player?

Not much. He's attained the same position there. John-A-Dreams is present in


him, as well. And the Harlequinade. But he is the reader who puts on the timesuit and understands the structure of the series as well, and can come back in. It's like walking into Hamlet and saying, "Stab the guy now, because you're going to be dead on page 38." He affects this thing; he tinkers with things. He's kind of me as the plotter in there, as well, and the one who understands that the whole thing's a structure and people have to be moved into place in order to fulfill the roles within the series. In a way all the characters are aspects of John-A-Dreams ...

He's only seen as the governor when Jack Flint is stripped back to the ultimate identity behind everyone. That was the whole point of his [story], that if we go too far with this deprogramming, we find the ultimate human self, which is JohnA-Dreams. When you re-enter the game, you forget who you are.

Exactly. You're taking the point of view of a player in the game. So when John-A-Dreams plays yet again as the Jack Flint character, he doesn't actually remember that he's really John-A-Dreams.

No, he's just Jack Flint, who's someone else pretending to be Jack Flint. How hard did you have to fight to finally get the rest of Volume 1 in trade paperback, years after the first collection?

It wasn't so bad once everyone realized the X-MENwas coming. The things are coming back in fashion. The things are selling okay. Everything's in there. I always get annoyed when people say I've missed out. But actually explained, everything's connected. Aside from Bruce Wayne, is Mason based on Drake from Illurninatus.!

You think? Actually I thought Sir Miles was Drake, because Drake's the one who goes wrong in his quest for enlightenment. Mason is based on Bruce Wayne at the start. He's kind of a projection of me with money, because I was earning some money. What would happen if you had that much money? Could you be trusted? And Mason's kind of representative of "Can we trust him?" There might be some of the people with money, maybe we should trust them. Maybe they've got ideas, too, because we're all human beings. And I drew also on John Mack's abductions book, that may be actually the genesis of it, because there's a story in there about some guy who's an abductee, and he gets ten pages to himself. He was a super rich heir to money, and he lived in upstate New York. I think the idea of someone like that having the experience fed into the Mason character. For a character so obviously representative of America, it was interesting that his only appearance in the third volume takes place in India.

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When you see the sequences in 2012 in the second volume, India's obviously become this huge economic power and a cultural power, so Mason's in exactly the right place. All that's unfolding. He can't be trusted in a lot of ways. Well, there's something twisted about fancying Robin as an Invisible in the 1990s and then putting the moves on her in the future, when she doesn't know he knows her.

Yeah, she's much younger! There's a lot ~f that in there. Some people have actually suspected it's Mason who's present when Fanny's getting raped by the four guys who are like the d e Sade figures. I kind of like that. It wasn't intentional but I think there's a possibility that maybe he was there. Quimper's there. Sir Miles is there, and a couple other people are there. You see Quimper hanging up - that was when he got his start. I think THEINVISIBLES is getting mainstream. I'm glad the trade paperbacks [are available]; people can get them. People are reading it and understanding it who couldn't understand it back in 1994. It really was pretty out there. The types I made use of in THEINVISIBLES are now really familiar. People forget they didn't exist in the culture. Back then they existed as the underground or in the heads of a bunch of psychedelic experimenters. I'd like them all in one big book, a Tokyo directory kind of thing. It was designed to be involving. I think people should be reading it as a huge, immersive experience. The sooner I can actually translate it into a game, the better.

I 0

0z m VI


BIOGRAPHIES

In a series that deals with time travel and fractured reality as often as THEINVISIULESdoes, it's helpful to consider some characters' personal histories. Included here are the life stories of the major players in the series, told chronologically for the first time. Dates have been calculated from clues within the series in an effort to provide a glimpse at what occurs between the panels. However, with some biographies awash in conflicting information (is Mason Lang born in 1963, as Ragged Robin suggests, or in 1972, as a caption in Volume 2 implies?), what we present is merely one interpretation (narrative caption tmnps hearsay, and so we opt for 1972 despite Mason's obvious age in the illustrations).

"Once I was a little light."


BOY Lucille Butler Lucille Butler and her two brothers grew u p in Harlem, where she was beaten by her father until older brother Martin was old enough to put a stop to it. She idolized Martin, following him into the NYPD. While both of her brothers moved out, Lucille stayed at home as an adult, investing her time into her work rather than her private life, a trend that continues into her time with the Invisibles. In December 1989, Lucille discovers that her partner Oscar is an Invisible on a case that ends with the death of her brother, the rapper Eezy D, and betrayal by Martin, who is revealed to be working for the enemy. Oscar, who had partnered with Lucille to test her suitability for the revolution, contacts John-A-Dreams and arranges for her to be inducted into his cell. She agrees, joining the Invisibles under the codename Boy to avenge Eezy D's death and vindicate Martin's work by fighting to repair it. [Cell 23 alleges that the Conspiracy implanted a bug in Boy's mind at this point, hidden in her desire for revenge. This is unlikely based o n the sheer mechanics required; there is no evidence in How I Became Invisible to support the claim, and the story itself doesn't seem to leave room for such an operation. A more plausible explanation may be that Cell 23 needed a pretext to "detain" Boy or face the threat of King Mob's cell exacting revenge for the kidnapping and theft.] Boy is the most grounded of the Invisibles, weary of their more outrageous antics - although she participates in the fox hunt of Dane, her facial expression suggests that she's the only Invisible refusing to get in character [it is perhaps due to this reluctance to engage in role play and fluid personae

that makes Boy s o susceptible to brainwashing by Cell 231. Her betrayal by Martin, whom she idolized, and the realization that Eezy D's conspiracy theories were correct instill a sense of conflict inside her that isn't resolved until she transcends combat altogether to leave the Invisibles in 1997. She appears to be the fight instructor for the team, teaching Dane martial arts. More than any other member, Boy takes Dane under her wing, explaining to him the mechanics of time travel and the basic structure of the Invisibles and their conflict. It is Boy who takes the time to notice that Dane lost his finger to Orlando, and Boy again who tries to hunt down both him and King Mob when they go missing. She enjoys European techno music and doesn't have much time for rap, despite [or perhaps because ofl her dead brother Eezy D being a gangsta rapper. Boy seems to dislike fantasy in general [possibly a result of having to fight s o hard to attain a "normal" life in Harlem], turning her nose down at the bondage scene at the Power Station and having little relish for time travel. This attitude extends to finding Jim Crow's car ridiculous and criticizing King Mob for his gallows humor. Yet ironically she thinks the British are too uptight. She has a poor sense of smell and avoids drugs and smart drinks. She is probably a fan of Maya Angelou [which seems a likelier source for her secondary codename than a knowledge of Hindu religion]. Boy's unarmed combat skills appear to be unparalleled in the team; despite the mythic status attributed to King Mob, it is Boy who manages to infiltrate Dulce completely unaided. Despite this, she is unable to defeat Jolly Roger

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in combat. She's a quick thinker in action, able to use even a baseball hat as a weapon or tool, and has solid detective skills. Boy employs these tools with the strictest morality of all the Invisibles, unable even to shoot her brother Martin on his pleas that imprisonment by the Conspiracy will be much worse. She believes she will marry someone like her brother Martin. She's excellent at first-person shooter video games, and doesn't believe Jack has learned any combat skills from her in their three years together. She is openminded enough to accept Eezy D's conspiracy theories given evidence, and compassionate enough to continue living with her father as an adult despite her childhood beatings. Boy falls for Dane while the Invisibles are in America, but she's mature enough to realize from the beginning that it can't last. The roots of this relationship occur early on Dane's side, perhaps inspired by misreading the attention she pays him. Boy falls for Dane much more slowly, perhaps experiencing the first stirrings on their trip to New York City in 1996 while the rest of the team recuperates in Mason Lang's safehouse. In 1997 Boy steals the Hand of Glory from her teammates, unable to adequately explain why. [It seems likely that Oscar, being a member of Cell 23, which seems to be the Invisible faction responsible for the Hand, implanted a subliminal retrieval order in the likelihood that Boy's cell actually ever came across it.] This lack of mental defenses is further evidenced by the ease with which Cell 23 brainwash her through a series of false memories and identities [that Lucille is the "true" identity seems evident by virtue of her unwillingness to shoot King Mob under orders from Cell 231, Dane is

able to read her mind with ease, yet she refuses to allow any of the Invisibles to establish a psychic link with her. Boy struggles with her membership in the Invisibles, writing an account of her induction in late 1995 as a form of therapy. In 1997 she makes contact with BARBELiTH after the trauma of her brainwashing [this contact probably leads to her resignation from the Invisibles shortly afterward]. By the summer of 1997 Boy realizes that simply by joining the Invisibles the enemy has won. She is the first member of the cell to reach this understanding [Robin and King Mob also eventually make the realization], and opts to return to a "normal" life. She feels disenchanted with her friends while on vacation in New Orleans, and ultimately leaves the team prior to their second infiltration of Dulce, moving back in with her parents. She still cares enough about Dane at this point to try to talk him into leaving the team; when he doesn't, she infiltrates Dulce by herself to make sure he survives the experience. But she is able to let him g o and move on. She similarly tries to talk Robin out of using the timesuit to return to 2012 to n o avail. Soon after leaving the Invisibles Boy has a daughter, who she names Robin. [There is no evidence that she attempted to rescue Martin from the dissident camp in Batavia, New York. Her sense of justice may lead her to believe Martin deserves his fate; alternately she may have been unable to locate him, or indeed possibly did free him.] She remains fond of her former teammates, although she appears not to have been in contact with any of them before King Mob visits her in 2012, when she asks about Dane.


BILLY CHANG By 1924 Chinese occultist Billy Chang owns a London club that fronts for an opium den, dedicated to overthrowing the remnants of Victorian culture by aiding the spread of subversive behavior. Chang is a member of the Golden Age Invisibles [perhaps choosing the code name Billy Chang with ironic intent]. He is a master of the occult, understanding implicitly that the Hand of Glory is capable of altering reality and remaining calm during its activation. Some time afterward Chang is arrested on what appear to be trumped up charges and spends more than a

year in Wormwood Scrubs. Later, he is deported from England. Edith calls him the key to everything [presumably because out of all the Golden Age Invisibles only Chang realizes that the successful path to revolution is through behavioral modification; he's beaten the modern King Mob to this realization by 75 years and is therefore far ahead of his time]. Billy Chang disappears from history "like a ghost." [It's interesting to speculate that he finds a timesuit and enters the supercontext. Or perhaps he is just John-A-Dreams once more, advancing the game in yet another fictionsuit?]

SIR MILES DELACOURT (d.im) Miles Delacourt was born in England in the late 1930s to an upper class family. He attends a fox hunt with his bullying father at a young age but is traumatized by the experience, particularly the blooding ritual. [Perhaps it is the callousness with which the hunt is carried out. The event may have been robbed of its significance by the brutality of the act, coupled with his father or brother's attitude about it. It's as if they want to hurry up and get it over with - as if the experience is important enough to drag Miles through, but not important enough to respect.] Miles is estranged from his father at an early age [and it's possible that much of the abuse he suffered as a child was, like Dane McGowan, in the form of neglect]. His unhappy childhood informs his opinion of parenthood as an adult [notably in his reaction to Jeremy Sutton's failure as a parent in 19951. Miles is sent to school at Eton.

Shortly afterward, he may have manifested psychic abilities. He becomes interested in the occult and begins frequenting niche bookshops. By 1957 Miles has become a beatnik. At a modern art exhibit he meets Beryl Wyndham, and his compassion for her as she cries in front of Picasso's Guernica spawns a deep friendship. Through Beryl, Miles becomes involved with the Ordo Templi Orientis and meets Frederick Harper-Seaton. [During this period Beryl appears to have told Miles about her past with the Invisibles, and may have even tried to induct him.] In 1960 Miles participates in a government LSD experiment recorded by the BBC. The experiment goes awry, and Miles makes contact with the Outer Church. Believing the Outer Church to represent the tnie nature of reality, Miles refocuses his life. The same year he founds the publishing company Nimoo Yoy Editions to self-release a tell-all


about Beryl's time with the Invisibles in 1995 when he is telling Brodie he called m e Invisibles. The book ruins should follow up on a lead within the Beryl [and likely ends their friend- gay community. That could point to ship]. He later joins the Anti-Masons repressed gay tendencies, but there is and, as part of an initiation, agrees in little else to back this up]. 1965 to murder Beryl and remove her Miles has theatrical tendencies, hand, to prove that he is beyond dressing in fox hunting clothes to human compassion [and most likely to supervise hunts of the homeless, but retrieve a hand suitable for creating a he has no sense of humor, annoyed Hand of Glory]. He carries out his task, to discover that someone has but spends his life feeling guilty about replaced firing range targets with it, leaving flowers at her grave every images of Santa Claus. He has little year. time for subordinates and rarely The event transforms Miles, who remembers their names. He continues reacts to his guilt by sublimating it to secretly frequent occult bookstores with anger toward the lower classes. through 1999. From this point he feels no guilt about In late 1995 a psychic interrogation any of his savage actions in the service of King Mob goes awry, resulting in of the Outer Church. He quickly rises the theft of his aura. Dane restores through the ranks of Anti-Masonry to Miles' aura shortly afterward, and the attain the 33rd degree. He comes into event appears to have broken free his inheritance and is eventually much of his repressed guilt. From this knighted. By 1995 he has the highest point on Miles exhibits less certainty level of security clearance in the UK about his role with the Outer Church, and US, with direct contact to the a sense of self-doubt that manifests Queen and secret military installations. most notably in his dream form. He hunts the homeless for sport. By 1997 Miles is married. Miles is an active agent of the Outer In 1999 Miles is kidnapped by the Church, in early 1995 personally Invisibles and subjected to a ' drugsupervising the fox hunt of runaway induced interrogation. He finds himself Dane McGowan in an effort to find a face to face with Beryl's corpse, further host body for the Archon. But his contributing to a pending mental arrogance causes him to inflate his breakdown. importance in the Church's hierarchy. In August of 1999 Miles presides He fears and avoids modification and over the attempted coronation of the often bucks the orders of his superiors. Moonchild in Westminster Abbey. By late 1995 the Church's patience During a fight with the Invisibles, he with Miles is wearing thin. Miss Dwyer shoots Jolly Roger but is finally forced is sent to supervise Miles' interrogation to accept that his life's work is ruined of King Mob, during which time she when Dane absorbs the King Archon must reprimand him twice. rather than being possessed by it. Miles has a seething hate for the Miles is so blinded by his life's Invisibles, especially King Mob [likely devotion to the Outer Church and its fueled by his sublimated guilt over crushing authority that he makes a Beryl and a history of setbacks last, insane plea to serve Dane, but is caused by Mob's cell. Perhaps Sir instead handed a rope. Miles commits Miles subconsciously desires King suicide by hanging himself by the Mob's life, or even desires King Mob. ankle in the rafters of Westminster He appears extremely self-conscious Abbey.


ELFAYED Elfayed makes contact with BARBELiTH sometime in the 1960s while piloting fighter jets for the Egyptian military. Shortly afterward he pursues study in Sufism, an esoteric branch of Islam. He is inducted into the Invisibles by 1968 [possibly making contact as a result of his earlier experiences] and trains at the North African academy with Mister Six. That year, the pair traveled to Paris, where Elfayed sees Mister Six adopt a new persona. [Whether he ever participates in missions on the front line or is always an instructor at the academy is unknown.] His experience appears practically unrivaled [by 1994 he is able

to explain the nature of the universe to King Mob]. Like Mister Six, he may be an "ascended master" of some kind. Despite this, Elfayed isn't above saying "fuck every now and again. He and Mister Six are quite good friends, probably equals in their wisdom and knowledge. He may be gay. He appears to have a close relationship with King Mob [probably developed while King Mob was training at the Academy], eager to lend a hand in looking for a "sign in the desert" in 1994. He seems to have an affection for teaching, as he is still at the academy when Jack and Roger arrive to study Kung Fu in 1999.

JACK FLINT (a.19~~1) John-A-Dreams, perhaps frustrated by his ill-fated organic re-entry into reality in the form of Quimper, re-enters once more via a fictionsuit and becomes Jack Flint. Unaware of his true nature, Flint joins an Invisibles cell [presumably peopled by Mister Six, George Harper and possibly Paddy Crowley, although they may well each belong to different cells]. Flint elects to go into deep cover in the Division X paranormal investigations unit, basing his new persona on the popular television character John Regan from 7;be Sweeney and erasing his true identity as an Invisible from his conscious mind. It is at this time that Flint adopts the Jack Flint moniker [and presumably the rank of detective inspector]. After Division X disbands following a disastrous investigation in 1976, Flint appears to have gone downhill,

trapped in a loveless third marriage and spending time in strip clubs. He performs fake tarot readings for old women to get cash. His favorite television show is the sitcom Father Ted, and he thinks Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is one of the best books in the English language. As a detective inspector, he's not averse to beating suspects for information. When Division X is reactivated in 1995, Flint is ecstatic for the escape from his mundane life, hunting down and re-enlisting former teammate George Harper. Flint works out that the enemy is planning to crown the Moonchild, discovered in a video produced by Quimper, on 11 August, 1999. In 1999 Flint is kidnapped by an Invisibles cell headed by former Division X cohort Mister Six and subjected to a drug-induced deprograrnrning


session. He discovers that he is a deepcover Invisible whose "Jack Flint" cover persona is scheduled to die of a fatal heart attack the next day. But the re-conditioning has touched on Flint's primordial persona, and he begins to realize that he is merely a fictionsuit for John-A-Dreams.

By August 1999 Jack Flint realizes the true nature of the universe, able to predict events by observing the solid surface of time. He predicts his own death in the attack on Westminster Abbey to prevent the coronation of the Moonchild, and is killed by the demon Orlando.

GEORGE HARPER Eric Millet Anarchist Eric Millet joins the Invisibles prior to 1976, meeting Mister Six and Jack Flint. The trio agree to assume new identities based on popular UK television characters while infiltrating Division X and the Paranormal Investigation Service (PIS) under deep cover: Millet became George Harper, submerging his Eric Millet identity in his deep subconscious and adopting a persona based on the popular television character George Carter, from 7%e Sweeney. As Harper, he remains with Division X until a disastrous case in 1976 splits the group and exposes their identities to the Conspiracy. Harper has limited psychic abilities, able to perceive things through time and psychometrically obtain data from physical items. He suffers from temporal lobe epilepsy, taped Princess Diana's funeral and envies the vice squad for

getting paid to watch pornography. He objects to the coercive methods used by Mister Six to decondition Jack Flint [though strangely he's not averse to beating suspects for information]. In 1995 Harper is recruited into a reformed Division X via Jack Flint, and together with Mister Six they spend the next few years hunting down the Moonchild, having discovered him on a tape produced by Quimper. By 1999 Division X has located the creature, but a failsafe heart attack programmed into the Jack Flint identity prompts Mister Six to begin emergency deprogramrning on him. Harper, who has spontaneously recalled his original identity and membership in the Invisibles, objects to Six's methods, and shoots him. Ultimately Harper joins with Six and Paddy Crowley to continue taking the PIS to new levels.

HELGA 014. Tannen Born in Sweden, Olga Tannen is inducted into the Invisibles prior to 1999, adopting the codename Helga [perhaps with ironic intent1 and joining Mister Six's cell. She's a genius with language, and spends much of her time as an Invisible learning and synthesizing

the alien alphabet. She appears to be a master of body language and is able to determine a person's emotional state through taste. The most telling piece of data about Helga comes from her own mouth: "I lie compulsively about everything. And

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I make the most outrageous things happen just by thinking about them and putting all the pieces together in the right shape." So any seemingly supernatural talents Helga possesses may simply be lies. In this sense she is much like King Mob, perhaps surpassing him. Helga creates her own reality in the tradition of the chaos magician perhaps the best illustration of this is Helga's grimoire. She creates her own, cutting and pasting images as her needs require - she uses images of a toilet to represent the Black Grail. She claims to have impregnated her brother and to possess a little brass engine instead of an appendix. Helga and King Mob take an instant liking to one another - engaging in some kind of sexual mischief their first night together. Helga's version of events involves a potato; King Mob's might not. She spends part of 1999 riding around with Mister Six and supervising Sir Miles' interrogation. She reads New Scientist, is fascinated with the alien alphabet and enjoys photography and filmmaking. After hooking u p with King Mob and Fanny in 1999, she films them digging up Beryl's bones. The three may have had a mBnage a trios shortly afterward. Her methods are unorthodox to say the least, a quality that is probably endearing to Mister Six. This leads her to release Sir Miles from captivity, to

much controversy from her associates. Her experiments with the alien alphabet are traumatic, but she continues to work with the letters, her passion for language overriding any sense of self-preservation. After an early experiment with the alphabet makes her vomit in the toilet, she merely increases her studies by dosing herself with the psychotropic Key 23. This trial initiates contact with beings [likely a form of Terrence McKenna's machine elves1 that are trying to manipulate language. Prior to the attack on Westminster Abbey in 1999, Helga shaves off all of her body hair [perhaps inspired by de Sade's nonsl. She and Mister Six spring a language trap on Sir Miles and provide him with rope to hang himself with. Helga is quite interested in Dane's experience in the mirror, asking him if he saw time. It is likely that Helga's experimentation with the alien language is representative of her thirst for knowledge in general. [Her motivation for joining the Invisibles may have come almost entirely from her thirst for knowledge - her desire to experience the Universe as it is, not how it is perceived.] After the final showdown with the Archons, Helga quits the Invisibles, reverting to her Olga Tannen identity and joining King Mob to pursue ontological methods of terrorism. By 2012 the pair are no longer together.

JACK FROST Dane Paul McGowan (b.1980) Dane McGowan is born in 1980, growing up in Liverpool with his mother after his father abandons the family. Although intelligent and well read, Dane becomes a criminal, vandalizing and thieving with a group of friends known as the Croxteth Posse.

He possesses psychic abilities, manifesting a Jack Frost avatar to cope with stressful situations. Dane is also able to perceive time non-linearly, and by the age of 15 is nonplussed by the sudden appearance of historical figures.


Dane deals with parental neglect by hiding behind a rebellious attitude. He needs to prove himself to his friends, betting them that he can steal cars and instigating an arson attack on his school [signs of a vulnerable child rather than shows of bravado]. He smokes, and wears the same clothes for several days [a sign of both depression and neglect]. He is impressed by US rap music and rabidly homophobic. In early 1995 Dane leads his friends in an attempt to burn down his school, in the process assaulting his teacher, a disguised Mister Six, who had attempted to show Dane some empathy. He is sentenced to 10 weeks in a reform center dubbed Harmony House, which in reality houses a Conspiracy brainwashing facility. Before he can be altered, Dane is rescued by King Mob and abandoned on the streets of London. His friend Gaz is not so lucky. Dane spends the next several months homeless on the streets of London, where he meets Tom O'Bedlam, who introduces him to magick. Dane initially distrusts Tom, but eventually the pair develop a bond as Tom secretly prepares him for contact with BARBELiTH and induction into the Invisibles. Dane and Tom part company after jumping from the top of Canary Wharf together, Dane materializing in Universe A and encountering BARBELiTH. He loses most of his memories of this time. Shortly afterward, Dane meets King Mob's cell, joining as the Invisible Jack Frost. He spends time learning the basics of Invisiblism and martial arts from Boy, quickly noting the absurdity of waging a war when one can't tell which side one is on. He is uncomfortable in the Invisibles, refusing to use his codename or exhibit camaraderie with Lord Fanny. Dane is unable to hold his alcohol, and doesn't

time travel well. After a mental journey to revolutionary France, Dane finds himself at the mercy of the demon Orlando, who cuts off his pinky. [His impotence here may be augmented by Fanny's easy defeat of Orlando.] Afraid, Dane abandons the team and steals King Mob's car. After crashing the car trying to avoid a Conspiracy trap, Dane finds himself threatened by a Myrmidon agent. He shoots the soldier in selfdefense, triggering a nervous breakdown that sends him away from the Invisibles and back to homelessness on the streets of London. During this time, Dane begins to recall the events surrounding his contact with BARBELiTH and acknowledge his true role in the war. He returns to Liverpool in an effort to find a place where he belongs, but is betrayed by a friend. Dane flees to his mother's apartment, where he is discovered by Boy and Mister Six, who have been trying to find him. Finding no solace with his friends or family, Dane finally accepts the mantle of Jack Frost and returns to London with his teammates. He uses his new confidence to defeat the Kingof-All-Tears during a mission to rescue King Mob and Fanny from the Conspiracy in late 1995, and completes his metan~orphosis by healing King Mob with magic mirror and compassionately restoring Miles Delacourt's aura. Secure in his role with the Invisibles, Dane spends much of 1996 vacationing in New York with Boy and Fanny, with whom he has begun to bond. In 1997 Dane obtains the Hand of Glory from the Harlequinade with Fanny, at which point he accepts her homosexuality and cements their friendship. Shortly afterward, he becomes

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romantically involved with Boy. He develops a strong psychic bond with her, able to track her remotely following her disappearance in 1997. They break up later that year, when Boy decides to quit the team. Dane, much like Boy, is extremely pragmatic. He's often frustrated by his team's techniques, yet he remains and does his part. Dane's most strained relationship is with King Mob. He disagrees with King Mob's methods in almost all situations, despising the violence, which seems useless and brutal. In late 1997 Dane meets Satan in the Conspiracy's headquarters in Dulce, traveling to Universe B to learn the nature of reality. By 1999 his cell has more or less dissolved, and Dane travels to the Invisibles' North African academy to learn Kung Fu. He trains with Elfayed, who teaches him the value of priorities. Later that year, he teams with Jolly Roger to destroy a Ciphermen birthing facility, demonstrating powers on a par with Tom O'Bedlam.

In August 1999 Dane takes part on an assault on Westminster Abbey in an effort to prevent the coronation of the Moonchild and the subsequent arrival of the King-of-All-Tears. Dane defeats the Archon by absorbing him, rather than being possessed by him. He meets Satan again, traveling to Universe B and discovering that it is connected to Universe A - both are part of the same system. His original Invisibles cell disintegrates after the events at Westminster Abbey, but Dane decides to form a new cell with Fanny. In 2001 he recruits Reynard, having come full circle by becoming a teacher. By 2012 his cell includes Ragged Robin and Takashi. On 22 December 2012 Dane locates his old friend Gaz, who is dying. Knowing the supercontext is materializing, Dane comforts his friend, telling him the history of the Invisibles and their war. Afterward, he shepherds humanity into its new phase of existence, proclaiming the evolution to a startled throng.

JIM CROW Jim Crow is born in Haiti, joining the Invisibles prior to 1992. He leads an Invisibles cell and the Voodoo rap group Root Doctaz [who may be one and the same]. He uses his spirituality as the basis for his activism, embarking on a grass roots black power campaign, encouraging black Americans to eschew the restrictive conservatism of Christianity and Islam and embrace the root of black power in Africa. He uses his popularity and notoriety as a rap artist and activist to hide himself out in the open. By 1992 Jim is close friends with

John-A-Dreams, embarking on long philosophical and occult conversations. The pair's cells work together on a mission in Haiti. He enjoys the music of Jimi Hendrix [possibly identifying with him as a child]. Jim blends technology with his practice of Voodoo, using a video tape of himself to enter trance. Jim is truly an Invisible of the people, allowing his patron loa Papa Guedhe to ride him in the service of the Voodoo community. He has a keen sense of poetic justice, and is ready and eager to help the oppressed. He has regular contact with


the magic mirror prior to most of his comrades, and is able to navigate the spirit world with ease. He has integrated death as a part of life and has n o fear of it. He is surrounded by tokens of death - his pet ouija bird is a crow, he has an Ace of Spades in his hat, he wears a skull as a codpiece and he drives a hearse. This makes him particularly effective against the dark magick of the enemy. He has unusual psychic powers, performing a psychic triangulation with Robin in 1995, a procedure normally associated with radio waves or electricity. He carries a zozo gun, which converts love energy to death. uim may have vision trouble in his right eye, frequently wearing a monocle.] He is overtly theatrical and sports a streak of black humor, notably in his

choice of code name. Jim Crow is not afraid of death or its agents, speaking casually to the scorpion loa Baron Zaraguin [indeed, he may have facilitated King Mob's contact with the loal. Despite leading an Invisibles cell, Jim isn't opposed to working alone, or with other cells. He is willing to kill his enemies, in 1995 shooting Miss Dwyer as a sacrifice to Guedhe. But he prefers to outsmart his foes, defeating US soldiers in 1997 with a bottle of water disguised as a deadly hantavirus. In 1999 Jim aids King Mob's cell remotely during its attack o n Westminster Abbey to stop the coronation of the Moonchild. Afterward, he establishes the Church of the Crow-Daddy in Chicago.

JOLLY ROGER (d.1999) Jolly Roger joins the Invisibles by 1988, training at the North African academy with King Mob under the tutelage of Elfayed and Mister Six. There she develops a friendship that is close enough to make King Mob's girlfriends jealous, despite the fact that she is a lesbian. [Their closeness seems to come from their ability to talk shop.] They both have a love of kicking ass and machismo, and they both project a dangerous persona to others. Jolly Roger's version consists of a skull-andbones t-shirt and eye patch as well as her stereotypically masculine behavior. This particular persona seems to point to a certain fear of vulnerability and inadequacy [which is perhaps another reason she gets along with King Mob so well. They understand each other]. She loses an eye after 1988. By 1996 she is head of her own

lesbian cell of Invisibles, dubbed the Poison Pussies. On a tip from an insider at the Conspiracy's underground base in Dulce, they mount an attack on the facility to steal an HIV vaccine. Roger is one of only two in the cell to escape, heading for Mason Lang's safehouse. There she reunites with King Mob, beginning the first of several missions in conjunction with his cell. The escapade fiiels her hatred of the US government, and she holds it responsible for the death of her team and all who suffer from AIDS. This hatred causes her to spur the Invisibles' second infiltration of the Dulce base. Jolly Roger dislikes Ragged Robin and Lord Fanny [the former for her closeness to King Mob; the latter for her femininity, or perhaps a stereotypical distance between lesbians and gay men]. She meets Jim Crow prior

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to 1996. Despite learning the White Flame meditation, she falls to Quimper's mind control efforts and bears a personal vendetta against him ever after. Her susceptibility to mental assault is a factor in late 1997, when she falls victim to a magic mirror attack by Quimper. Roger is adept at physical combat. By 1999 she is at the Invisibles' North African academy studying Kung Fu. She and Dane develop a camaraderie, partnering to destroy a Ciphermen growth facility in advance of the attack on Westminster Abbey. She is bored

when not presented with action, passing her time at the Academy flipping through magazines or threatening insects when Dane is occupied. Jolly Roger's violent approach eventually leaves her behind the growth curve of the other Invisibles, who have adopted a more pacifist attitude toward revolution. She charges into the battle at Westminster Abbey in 1999 as the only Invisible armed with a gun. She is disarmed by an Archon and dies in the melee, murdered by Miles Delacourt. Her body is dumped in an unmarked grave.

JOHN-A-DREAMS Prior to joining the Invisibles, JohnA-Dreams is part of the upper class, attending public school. He eventually becomes the leader of King Mob's Invisibles cell, responsible for inducting new members Ragged Robin, Boy and Lord Fanny. Notable for his sense of humor, John is prone to spending hours discussing Voodoo with Jim Crow. He is obsessed with locating the Hand of Glory, a search that ultimately brings him to a Philadelphia church in September 1992, where he and King Mob discover a discarded timesuit that appears in the form of a colony of mutated humans and vegetables. John enters the timesuit and rotates into the Outer Church.

Believing that the Outer Church is the limit of objective reality, John-ADreams consents to surgery that alters his eyes and may influence his freedom of thought. He returns to objective reality in August 1999 for the abortive coronation of the Moonchild in Westminster Abbey. In defeat, John-A-Dreams returns to the Outer Church, attempting to re-enter reality and alter events s o that the Outer Church emerges triumphant. One of these returns occurs in the form of Quimper; another, Jack Flint. In both instances, John-A-Dreams' objective self is sublimated by the subjective selves of Quimper and Flint, who remain unaware of their true nature.

KING MOB Ronald Tolliver (d.1937) Nothing is known of Ronald Tolliver prior to 1916, when he participates in the battle of the Somme during the first World War. After his return to

England he meets and falls in love with Beryl Wyndham, who introduces him to the Invisibles. By 1924 he is the most active of the


Golden Age Invisibles, a violent anarchist who, in his King Mob guise, brings the war directly to the establishment by hurling bombs into police stations [presumably the horrors of the war turned him against the same institution he served]. Yet for all of his politics he is unable to rise against the bulk of his cultural conditioning, still calling blacks "niggers." King Mob is present at the activation

of the Hand of Glory in London. The event transports him through time, where he sees an older Beryl weeping at an art exhibition and an infant Bobby Murray. Tolliver ultimately dies in the bombing at Guernica in 1937 during the Spanish civil war. In his final moments he sees Beryl, inexplicably young [herself transported via the activation of the Hand of Glory].

KING MOB Gideon Staronewski (b.1960) [It seems reasonableto assume that the memories Sir Miles discoven in Entropy in the UKare for the most part real; certainly he reveals his real name - as demonstrated in 3.2 -and the Kirk Morrison cover identity. Therefore, w e have accepted the biographical information presented in Entropy in the UKat face value unless otherwise noted. We use the earliest of the indeterminate birth dates given in the series - 1960/1961 - on the basis that King Mob's vanity makes it likely that he is older than he likes to reveal. A case in point is his obsession with his face after escaping Sir Miles' interrogation in Entropy in the UK.]

Gideon Starorzewski is born to a Polish artist father and an English political radical mother in 1960, growing up in a Chelsea high rise. In school, he spends hours learning to write with his left hand, and reads Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius stories in addition to Famous Monsters magazine. On television he watches n e Avengers, Doctor U%bo, i%e Prisoner and Jason King; he wants to grow up and live in one of these shows, spawning a pop culture obsession that will last his entire life. He has his first drug experience at age 19 - hash, while his parents are on vacation. The same year he backpacks on Glastonbury Tor. By 1981 he is performing in the Beatles-inspired psychedelic band The Five, moving later

into the punk subculture, where he meets Jacqui in 1985. That year, his first novel, Dis, is published under the pseudonym Kirk Morrison. The novel is followed up by Lord Worm in early 1988, and ?he Killing Moon, about a werewolf. Flush with royalties, Gideon begins searching the world for hidden meaning and truth, finally meeting Edith Manning on May 1, 1988 during a suicidal bout of depression [possibly linked to the divorce of his parents and his subsequent estrangement from his mother], listening to Morrissey on the steps of the Manikarnika in Varanasi, India. Despite these travels, he never learns to like Indonesian food, although he eats nasi goreng. He has a fear of Indian buses so strong it forms a part of his subconscious mental defenses. Sometime between 1988 and 1989 Gideon joins the Invisibles as King Mob [It is likely that Edith introduces him to the team shortly after their meeting in Varanasil. He trains in Africa with Jolly Roger under Mister Six and Elfayed, and wears a mask topped with a mane of razor wire on missions. Book royalties enable him to buy a modified sports car, which is rigged to explode if a code sequence isn't keyed into the ignition.


As an Invisible, he retains a flat in Brixton for use in his Kirk Morrison persona. He claims to be a master assassin, but rarely uses these powers in the traditional assassin's role, instead serving as soldier. He learns psychic martial arts in a deal with the scorpion loa Zaraguin, a deal he has not repaid. Despite formidable psychic defenses, including the ability to remove auras, possess enemies, destroy souls and hide in shifting cover personalities, he is not totally resistant to the mind drug Key 17. His prime mental resistance is the White Flame meditation, which appears to be a personal entrenchment of E-Prime (English without the word "is"). In September 1992, King Mob and fellow Invisible John-A-Dreams discover an abandoned timesuit in a Philadelphia church. The episode drives him insane for a month, and he is subsequently unable to deal with the disappearance of John, whom he idolizes. During his time with John, he meets Boy, Lord Fanny and Ragged Robin, whom he at first finds spooky but later falls in love with. Sometime in 1994, he travels to Ayers Rock in Australia to continue his magical initiation, at which time he makes contact with BARBELiTH, which appears to him as a giant, Illurninatus!-inspired submarine. As King Mob, Gideon sinks into bloodlust, casually killing his close friend Joni over a hex in late 1994. At some point during this period Jacqui leaves him, unable to handle his violence [We theorize this occurred after discovering the timesuit in September 1992 sent King Mob into a month's flirtation with madness; this event likely contributed to his rising bloodlust, which in turn, along with his interest in "black magick," contributed to Jacqui's departure. As with any pattern, this in turn probably contributed to

increasing his callous violence, to the point where he kills Joni in 1994 and is able to kill with impunity as the series opens, in early 19951. He never recovers from this separation, calling Jacqui after the disastrous attack on Westminster Abbey in 1999, when he believes he is dying. At some point after separating from Jacqui, he collects a series of scars on his back. In late 1995 King Mob becomes blood brothers with Sir Miles in a blood transfusion, subsequently removing his nemesis' aura. He is intensely loyal, preferring to die in custody than allow Fanny to be injured helping him escape from the House of Fun. He has considerable tactical skills, in evidence during the cunning Orlando impersonation in the windmill and his use of Key 17 to defeat Miss Dwyer in the House of Fun. He is not averse to forcing allies to perform specific deeds (demanding that a frail Edith Manning aid in locating the runaway Dane McGowan), and can be uncaring about those outside the boundaries of his mission (leaving Gaz behind in Harmony House despite Dane's plea). Although he will be looked after from a distance, King Mob is quite willing to abandon Dane in London. Despite this, he has a soft spot for babies. King Mob places great importance on being individual. Despite his efforts to appear a straightforward "lad," he enjoys performing oral sex on women and volunteers to perform a sex ritual with a 95-year-old Edith to locate Dane McGowan. He uses drugs for magick and recreation. His magical framework is a personal form of chaos magick that draws heavily on Indian mythology and the Beatles. He has a scorpion tattooed at the base of his spine, and makes an offering to the Hindu god Ganesh at the start of each endeavor. He has a strong sense

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of smell, which is rankled by time travel, and believes in the power of Reichian therapy. One of his oldest friends is Emilio, a Scot working in New Mexico. He enjoys UK guitar bands such as the Kinks and Kula Shaker. He has read THEINVISIBLES comic book, and found it far-fetched. Contact with the magic mirror draws out his worst memories Jacqui leaving him and his cats dying and also projects his greatest fear, namely that he is a slob who hasn't accomplished anything. Indeed, given the opportunity for autocritique, he fears that the cool anarchist figure he represents really supports authority. Tom O'Bedlam taught him to access the Invisible College, and presumably how to use the Universe B shortcut to travel long distances in short periods. King Mob rather likes the sordid environment, making friends with one of its denizens and looking forward to spraypainting his name on the Universe B version of the Berlin Wall. In late 1996 he loses control of the Invisibles to Ragged Robin in a lottery drawing. The following year he psychically travels to 1924, where he meets the young Edith Manning, whom he

sleeps with. They spend the next day, which he considers one of the best of his life, composing silly songs at the piano. He enjoys cookies, tends to exaggerate when telling stories, likes Italian suits and can tell the time by the position of the stars. Despite all the violence in his life, he considers digging up Beryl's corpse the worst thing he's ever done. By late 1997 he stops using guns, opting for what he calls ontological terrorism. The transformation is complete in 1999, when he sacrifices the King Mob identity and becomes Gideon Starorzewski once more, exchanging the Invisibles' lifestyle for a more culturally informed strategy. He makes a special gun in 2001 for combating the King-of-All-Tears 11 years later. By 2012 he is head of the massive Technoccult corporation, which sells the Invisibles' experience through interactive gaming in an effort to spur awareness and thereby trigger the supercontext. On December 22, 2012, he defeats the King-of-all-Tears and forces the metamorphosis of reality. Absorbed into the supercontext, he becomes a famous pop star author enjoying an infinite party.

MASON ANDREW LANG (1972-2,112) Mason Lang encounters BARBELiTH at the age of nine while being driven home from a birthday party. He interprets the event as an alien abduction and is haunted by it afterward. At some later point in his childhood his father comes into a large fortune, either through an inheritance or business [it's unlikely the Langs are very rich during the abduction period, judging from the styling of the car and the fact that his mother is driving it, although they may certainly be well off. This late experience with money

may be why Mason is not snobbish]. By 1995 Mason Lang runs an Invisibles safehouse in upstate New York [presumably having come across an Invisibles cell during his investigation into other abduction experiences]. He's heavily into conspiracy theory and popular culture, seemingly unable to watch a film without spotting dozens of occult or conspiratorial scenes. As an Invisible, Mason uses his fortune to research liquid computer technology, having received a vision


of a Holy Grail of liquid information during his abduction experience. A number of companies are set u p for this and other purposes, including environmental and time travel research, although Mason doesn't know what all of his companies are up to. Mason drives with the Invisibles cross-country in late 1996 to New Mexico, where he is happy to take LSD with King Mob and his friends in the desert as a prelude to the Invisibles' infiltration of the Dulce base. Despite the trip, Mason is not a fighter and doesn't enter the base with them. Although he is considerably grounded for a billionaire, Mason nevertheless seems unprepared for the reality of Invisibles missions when he actually accompanies them in the search for Boy at the Motech building. His autocritique experience under the

alien alphabet weapon suggests that he secretly sees people as commodities, and indeed he tries to buy his way out of problems. He is also willing to bluff his way through them, as when the US military tries to take the timesuit. Mason is friendly with his sister Kathryn, taking the time to attend a party of hers in New York City even as the Invisibles prepare for their second attack on the Dulce base. After the Invisibles leave America, Mason spends some time traveling the world. He meets King Mob and Edith Manning in India in early 1999. In 2008, Mason frees Kay from a mental institution, introducing her to Takashi Satoh. They have a brief affair, during which he lies about his age. Mason dies in early 2012, having won control of the Western military industrial complex.

LORD FANNY Hilde ~ o r a ~ (b.1972) es Hilde Morales is born in Rio d e Janiero, Brazil in 1972 to Adelinda and Eugenio Morales. Hilde grows up in a family of bmjas, her grandmother being the most feared in the city. Hilde's mother is unable to give birth to a daughter, the traditional beneficiary of the line of bruja knowledge. After a second attempt at giving birth to a daughter ended in miscarriage, Hilde's grandmother decides to raise Hilde as a girl. Hilde accepts the new gender assignment [with a joy that suggests she was born with an inclination toward femininity]. Hilde also takes a liking to boys at an early age, her role as a female perhaps making it easier to accept her homosexuality. In 1979, Hilde's mother is murdered at a party in Rio by a man wearing a papier machk mask. Instead of staying

with her father, who had rejected the idea of raising her as a female, Hilde goes to live with her grandmother and "aunt." While still a pre-adolescent, Hilde is taken to Teotihuacan in Mexico for her initiation. There she is left on the steps of one of the great pyramids, her thigh cut to simulate menstruation. Her grandmother gives her a hallucinogenic drink, possibly ayahuasca, and she undergoes a magical initiation that reveals her patron goddess to be Tlazolteotl, deity of filth and lust. Hilde outwits Tezcatlipoca during this trial, winning safe passage to Mictlan, where she discovers that gods are masks. Her life is spared by Mictlantecuhtli, god of the underworld, on the condition that she offer someone to take her place.


Returning to the land of the living, Hilde demands to see Izpapalotl's true face, and is rewarded with a view of the structure of the universe and time. By 1990 Hilde has become a prostitute in Brazil. One evening during Carnival, Hilde is taken to a party held by men in pupier much6 masks, like her mother before her. She is brutally raped and tortured, along with Quimper, who has emerged into reality from the supercontext in the form of an alien antibody. The experience drives her to suicide, but before she can overdose she has an epiphany and realizes that she is able to transform the darkness around her into light. She flushes her pills, and moments later meets John-A-Dreams, who inducts her into the Invisibles as Lord Fanny. Fanny uses her magical abilities to defend the Invisibles on their missions, lacking the fighting skills of Boy or King Mob. She avoids weapons, and tolerates Dane's insults after he joins the team. She spends most of her time in drag, viewing her female persona as more powerful than her male self. Fanny lives alone, although she gets along with all of the Invisibles bar Jolly Roger. She reads Skin Two but doesn't usually dress in fetish gear [perhaps she gives King Mob fashion tips]. She's seen Barbra Streisand in concert, likes Archie comics and loves to dance. She's not afraid to humiliate homophobes in public. She spends early 1995 at the Invisibles' North African academy. Fanny's nemesis is the demon Orlando, whom she defeats in 1995 and again in 1999. She is a quick thinker in combat [saving Dane from Orlando by attacking him with her shoes]. She is kidnapped in late 1995 by the Conspiracy after a dizzying encounter with the magic mirror,

which revealed that her initiation is ongoing. She offers Brodie, her assailant, to Mictlantecuhtli in her place, meeting a debt from her initiation. By 1997 she is close friends with Dane, the pair having bonded while obtaining the Hand of Glory from the Harlequinade. Later that year she psychically detects Quimper in Ragged Robin's mind and organizes a surgical strike on the Conspiracy to eliminate Quimper. Having previously met Quimper in 1990 and seeing him as worthy of sympathy and deserving redemption, Fanny bathes Quimper and herself in magic mirror, showing him the positive side of the mirror he's not yet seen. It is in this moment that Fanny transforms from the redeemed into the redeemer, having the empathy and love to illuminate Quimper instead of destroying him. Later, Fanny nurses Dane until he recovers from a shamanic fever. Shortly afterward, the team disbands. In 1999 Fanny rejoins King Mob's cell in preparation for the attack on Westminster Abbey to prevent the coronation of the Moonchild. She aids in Miles Delacourt's interrogation and may participate in a mBnage a trios with King Mob and Helga. Fanny prepares for the attack by spreading a magical glamour over London [probably in the form of d n ~ n k e ndebauchery]. In the Abbey, she defeats Orlando and is stunned to encounter John-A-Dreams, her redeemer, working as an agent of the Outer Church. Fanny travels with Dane to Rio in 2000 via New York City. She helps him form a new cell, which eventually includes Reynard, Ragged Robin and Takashi. By 2012 she is extremely fat. On 22 December 2012 she helps send Robin back in time, and is injured in an Archon attack on the


timesuit facility. She is rescued by King Mob, witnessing the ultimate

defeat of the King-of-All-Tears and the onset of the supercontext.

EDITH MANNING (iooa-isso) In 1918 Edith Manning meets Beryl Wyndham. A lesbian affair ultimately leads to Beryl inducting Edith into an Invisibles cell containing herself, Ronald Tolliver, Billy Chang and Edith's cousin Freddie. Edith is attracted by the glamour of the scene, but views it more as a playground than a commitment [although she's happy enough to do solo work such as challenging Papa Skat, it appears that she was never committed enough to select a codenamel. Edith embraces the roaring '20s head on, following the flapper lifestyle and a life of money, drugs and bisexuality. She's quite racy [nevermind her lesbian affairs - a white woman alone in a black New York bar listening to jazz would have been beyond the pale], and in her time has affairs with Tallulah Bankhead, Aleister Crowley, F Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso. [Despite her embrace of debauchery, Freddie says she never had a m8nage a troisl. In early 1924 Edith travels to India with Freddie. There, she learns the tantra from Mr. Reddy, who thrills her with his 10ln-inch penis, and is baptized in the Ganges, thus removing her soul from the wheel of reincarnation. Reddy also shows her the true form of humanity as a man-shaped mass of energy. In 1924 Edith meets the modern King Mob, who has projected an astral form back in time in an effort to learn more about the Hand of Glory, which Edith's cell discovers. Although she is a vivacious flirt, Edith is also quite steeled, more than willing to pull a gun on Papa Skat in an effort to steal the

Hand. She volunteers to meet the Harlequinade to win the Hand, and although the experience leaves her distressed for at least a few weeks [as evidenced by her behavior immediately afterward and on the ship to London, a voyage that in 1924 would have taken at least two weeks], she is also the only person to have contact with BARBELiTH without undergoing a trauma immediately beforehand. Edith views Freddie as her pet project, determined to make him the most powerful magician of his age. Her deliberate cruelty toward this end accomplishes the goal, but at the expense of his sanity. The two share a mental link, which is temporarily severed by her second activation of the Hand of Glory. Upon being shown the true nature of reality, she is unable to comprehend how all times can be one and has a breakdown. Edith falls for King Mob during his limited time in 1924. They sleep together, Mr. Reddy having shown her how to have sex with a thoughtform, and spend the next day composing silly songs at the piano. By the 1930s Edith is traveling in the same circles as the Langs [suggesting her fortunes have fallen somewhat]. In 1933 she has a miscarriage on the steps of a Fortnum & Mason department store. A passing gentleman scoops up the fetus in his hat and returns it to her, for which she is eternally grateful. By 1937 her Invisibles cell has fallen apart, destroyed by the death of Ronald Tolliver. Edith moves to America, where she marries twice.


In 1945 Edith stops wearing Chanel No. 5, even though it is her favorite perfume. In 1951 she visits Wilhelm Reich at Organon. At 65 Edith retires unhappily. By 1969 she stops drinking, and the next year she returns to England briefly before moving to Paris, where she lives alone, all of her lovers dead. She is childless, unable to have children [possibly as a result of radiation from cradling the Hand of Glory]. Like King Mob, Edith is quite vain, displeased with growing old. She is nostalgic for her past, but bears extreme guilt about what she did to Freddie. On May 1, 1988 Edith comes across a young King Mob on the Manikarnika ghat in Varanasi, India. Recognizing him, she introduces herself and inducts him into the Invisibles. By 1994 Edith has fallen out of touch with King Mob [who hasn't spoken to her since before John-A-Dreams' disap-

pearance, which she discovers through other sources]. They resume a strained relationship in spring 1995, consisting mainly of Edith helping him with specific requests. By 1999 however their relationship has become quite close again, and it is he whom she requests to be present at her death. Edith visits the Marquis de Sade at La Coste in May 1999 but is unimpressed with what she finds, claiming his plans for the future of humanity have no emotion. In early 1999 Edith receives a series of five letters from Tom O'Bedlam, telling her it is time to die. She is visited by an apparition of Tom shortly before she passes away. Edith wills herself to death in 1999, determined not to give the Queen the pleasure of sending her a centennial birthday telegram. King Mob burns her corpse in the Ganges. By 2012, he has turned her memoirs into a video game intended to help create Invisibles.

MISTER SIX aka Jon Six aka Brian Malcolm ["Mister Six" appears to be a general code name for this individual and not, as some fans theorize, specific to the Jason King persona. The lnvisibles use the name throughout the first volume, before he adopts the new guise.]

Little is known of Jon Six prior to 1968, save that he steals champagne from Harrod's in 1962. He studies at the Invisibles' North African academy in 1968 with Elfayed. That year, the pair travels to Paris, where [perhaps for the first time, using newly learned skills] Six changes personalities. By the mid-1970s, Mister Six joins Division X, a department of the UK government dedicated to investigating paranormal phenomena. The members

of Division X adopt personalities based on popular television characters of the time to hide their true identities. Six chooses Jason King, played by Peter Wyngarde in the series Department S and Jason King. By 1976 an unnamed enemy discovers the identities of Division X when a case goes awry; as a result the department disbands. Six's fortune wanes and he spends the latter part of the '70s in a bedsit shared with a hash dealer. [It is perhaps during this period that he alternately worked at Khalso Kebab in Stoke Newington and the Samaritans.] He becomes Brian Malcolm in 1986 and by 1988 is teaching history in Liverpool [possibly as part of an effort


to create Invisibles, although he may merely have been trying to repair a life gone downhill since the Queen's Jubilee]. This persona possesses a short temper, although his Mister Six personality does not. As Brian Malcolm, the school becomes his life [unless his evening presence in 1.1 is an anomaly, although Boy suggests in 1.5 that he has been specifically fostering Dane]. The Malcolm persona loses the fighting skills associated with Mister Six - he's easily overcome by a trio of boys and later proves no match for Dane's Jack Frost powers. He is a union member [presumably the teachers' union]. While Brian Malcolm, he continues to teach at the North African academy with Elfayed, training both King Mob and Jolly Roger in the White Flame meditation. [It's probable that Mister Six teaches specialized lessons on school holidays, unless we assume he teaches afternoon classes in Africa and travel daily via the Universe A shortcut. If the shortcuts used by Six and King Mob are tied to geographic locations, a doorway may well be in the Liverpool school, explaining his evening presence in issue 1.11. While helping King Mob's cell in the House of Fun in 1995, Six sacrifices his Brian Malcolm persona to seal a reality abscess.

Mister Six reassumes his Jason King persona with the reactivation of Division X, of which he falsely believes himself to be the only Invisible member. In this persona, he possesses the ability to read minds. He helps Division X track down the Moonchild, rejoins Elfayed in teaching at the North African academy, and joins [and perhaps founds1 a third Invisibles cell, this time joined by Purves and his girlfriend Helga. In 1999 he accepts an invitation to join the King in Yellow, from whom he learns the true nature of reality and that the Harlequinade are the secret head of the Invisibles. After the events at Westminster Abbey, Six and his teammates reform Division X. Six has a fully developed selfawareness, to the point of fluid personality, discarding personae like clothing with no perceived ill effects. He is extremely confident, able to urinate in public and unconcerned when his girlfriend sleeps with King Mob, although he admits he is scared during the Westminster Abbey affair. He condones aggressive deconditioning techniques and is a proponent of change through crisis [indeed one suspects he'd have had a much happier time at La Coste than Edith did].

QUEEN MAB ~ e r Alice y ~ Wyndham (1883-1965) [The dates presented for Beryl's birth don't correlate with other, more reliable informationpresented in the series. Although her tombstone records her birth in 1896, Edith says the pair met when Beryl was 25 and Edith 18. This places the year of meeting in 1918, when, according to the tombstone, Beryl would have been 22. It seems unlikely that a young woman of Beryl's nature would claim to be older than she is, rather than younger; therefore, we assume that Edith is correct and

that Beryl maintained a healthy three-year reduction in her stated age, which carried over to her tombstone.]

London socialite Beryl Wyndham joins the Invisibles by 1924, adopting the name Queen Mab, the mythical queen of the fairie. After a brief lesbian affair at the age of 25 with Edith Manning, whom she inducts into the Invisibles,


Beryl has a love affair with Ronald Tolliver, who has adopted the moniker King Mob and who she also inducts into the Invisibles. With Tolliver, Queen Mab conducts a terrorist war o n the British establishment, blowing u p police stations. When her links to the bombings become public knowledge in 1960, she is ruined. Beryl possesses some form of psychic ability, able to see a vision of Ragged Robin while in a trance, and contact spirits through a ouija board. When the Hand of Glory is activated, she witnesses Tolliver die in the battle of Guernica. In 1957 she meets Miles Delacourt at an art exhibition. The pair strike u p a friendship, joining the Ordo Templi

Orientis. During this time she tells Miles about her time with the Invisibles. In 1960 Miles publishes a tell-all book called iSbe Invisibles, exposing Beryl's activities. The fallout from the book ruins her, and she withdraws from society. In 1965 Sir Miles murders Beryl, chopping off her left hand in a ritual act ostensibly to prove his inhumanity. In reality his cult masters use the hand - that of a murderer - to create the Hand of Glory. In 1999, Beryl's skeleton is dug u p by the then-contemporary King Mob, Lord Fanny and Helga, and used as part of an effort to brainwash Sir Miles.

Quimper emerges from the supercontext as a spirit, perceived through various cultural lenses by children around the world beginning at some point just prior to 1990 [Quimper's rape is likely to occur quite soon after he first appears in our reality to so radically alter his worldview]. Visiting Rio as an alien gray in 1990 he is kidnapped by a consortium of masked men who crucify him at a private orgy, attended by both Satan and the pre-Invisibles Lord Fanny, then working as a prostitute. At the party, Quimper is physically and psychologically abused before being raped [and possibly burned alive]. He survives the experience [possibly with the aid of the surgeon fish of the Outer Church, to whom Sir Miles may have sold him in an attempt to curry favor and advance in the ranks] but is horribly disfigured. By 1996 he is operating several strip clubs in the Soho district of London. A

side business in custom pornography allows him to pursue a few hobbies, presumably including collecting images of himself [itself an obsession possibly resulting from his disfigurement]. Among these videos are sequences filmed for Sir Miles in which the Moonchild rapes a series of women, including Diana Spencer, in an attempt to produce a king to be crowned in Westminster Abbey during the eclipse of 1999. Quimper takes to wearing a stylized mask and avoiding mirrors. He adopts a white suit [presumably the suit is a vain attempt at appearing human, probably a n unconscious remembrance of his former self, John-A-Dreams, who wore a similar suit]. Quimper can only see in shades of gray, although whether this is a congenital defect, the result of the burns, or a side effect of the surgeon fish is unknown. The collapse of his strip club


enterprise due to the untimely investigations of Division X sends him to a secret US military base in New Mexico [where he likely seeks to evade capture with the protection of Colonel Friday]. Perhaps as a result of his time with Friday, Quimper becomes more aggressive in the use of his psychic abilities, embracing casual violence and the degradation of others. Either through natural ability or technology, Quimper is able to control the magic mirror, using it as a weapon against the Invisibles. His telepathic powers are quite strong it's not until encountering Jolly Roger in 1996 that he finds someone able to break free of his possession.

Quimper has the ability to implant a replicating incubus in the minds of others, allowing him to take control of his victims at any point. Yet he's also able to be fooled by false memories, and isn't capable of reading minds in general [he's completely unaware that Fanny is acting as a Robin decoy during the Invisibles' second infiltration of Dulce]. Unlike Friday, Quimper doesn't bleed when Satan is near. Quimper's life in objective reality is quite short, ending in 1997 when Fanny envelops him in magic mirror, delivering him into the supercontext [from which he will return, more successfully, in a fictionsuit called Jack Flint].

RAGGED ROBIN Kay(b.1988) Kay is born on June 14, 1988 and learns to speak watching movies such as The Magic Christian. Eight-year-old Kay sees a future vision of herself at the Ildesonso pueblo in New Mexico in 1996. The encounter haunts her to the point where she keeps a photograph of a cloud formation taken that day. The obsession sends Kay into an occult phase, during which she discovers Miles Delacourt's The Invisibles [and presumably the 1990s comic book series], falling in love with a picture of the author. In 2005 Kay uses Sky with her friend Kerry; the drug simulates contact with extraterrestrials. Although not yet a student, she bribes a guard into letting her use a ganzfeldt tank at Berkeley to write her own version of The Invisibles by allowing him to read her sex diary. In her version of the story, she inserts herself as a character

and changes history for others [she rewrites the second Dulce attack so that Jolly Roger doesn't get shot]. By 2008 Kay wears white and red facepaint regularly and has dyed her hair red, inspired by her knowledge of the Invisibles [likely based on the characters from 120 Days of Sodom in an ironic gesture similar to Reynard's choice of name, transforming darkness into light. This ironic mode of combat manifests itself in her decision to call her daughter Quimperl. A rogue nanomachine swarm spurs her to wear an anti-nanite bracelet, which she wears out of habit even in the past. Her work on The Invisibles consumes her, and she becomes afraid to finish the book, fearing she may become trapped in the words. She suffers a breakdown that year and is committed by her parents to an asylum in Portland, where she is randomly given


the Xener test for ESP, on which she scores quite highly. On October 25, 2008 she is released from the asylum by Mason Lang, who has been monitoring Xener ESP test results. They have a brief affair, traveling around the world. In 2009 she meets Takashi, who introduces her to the Invisibles in 2010, at this point comprised of Dane, Fanny, Reynard and Takashi. She is exposed to magic mirror and the nature of the revolution, agreeing to be the debut pilot for Takashi's new timesuit and adopting the codename Ragged Robin. During this period Robin lives in San Francisco at home with her brother, Toby. On television she watches vintage episodes of The Prisoner, follows the gay soap opera Dolly Boys Down Under and has little time for top model Shae Fox. She drives a motorcycle, and believes the large Technoccult corporation is a tool of the Conspiracy. Dane is her pillar of support while in the Invisibles. On December 22, 2012, as the King-of-All-Tears descends on the Invisibles' headquarters, killing Takashi, Robin uses a timesuit to travel backward in time. She lands at some point prior to September 1992, at which point she is recruited by John-ADreams into his Invisibles cell, which is primarily concerned at that time with printing underground magazines. Robin doesn't believe in Voodoo or the tarot, but carries a tarot deck with her and conducts random readings. She occasionally refers to herself in the third person [possibly because she spent so much time writing her own story]. Robin is the most compassionate of the Invisibles, unable to get into character during the fox hunt of Dane and handing him a pound coin when he's under surveillance. She thinks psychic interrogation is unethical, and

is uncomfortable with violence. She has killed enemy soldiers, but considers it murder. Nevertheless, she is willing to erase the Invisibles' short-term memories when necessary. She has seen Easy Rider, and always wanted to re-enact the graveyard LSD scene. Meeting Dane in 1995, she forgets that her first words were supposed to be, "I'm Ragged Robin, I'm nuts," blurting it a few moments later [perhaps she is stunned to see how different her anchor is; this may also be why she's so close with Dane in 2012 but slightly distant throughout the 1990~1.In 1995 she begins wearing frilly clothes and ratty hair, based on the grown Dane's recollections. She's not comfortable in the clothes, and by 1997 has reverted to the sexier gear she was used to in 2012. Robin is slightly telepathic, able to detect the presence of Myrmidons and locate the Marquis d e Sade. She's not strong enough to break through Dane's mental shields when he's hiding on the streets of London in fall of 1995. [However, her telepathic powers are probably strong enough to cloud the thoughts of random passersby to the point that they don't recognize her outrageous makeup, as nobody in the entire series ever comments on it.] When Quimper plants an incubus in her mind in the fall of 1996, she is clever enough to trap it in a false abuse memory. She has a cybernetic implant on her skull to augment her telepathic abilities. Robin doesn't have many fighting skills, but she's not frightened of Myrmidons, haunted houses or Satan. Robin's a pragmatist, easily dismissing the Head of John the Baptist despite its profound historical significance because it's of no use to her personally. She's calm under pressure, and although unafraid of Satan, she is wise


enough to decline a game of chess with him. Robin has a slightly addictive personality, acquiring nearly instant obsessions with Sky, smart drinks and, later, King Mob. Despite her history with Mason, she suspects he may be hoaxing the 1990s Invisibles after the Scorpio experience. Nevertheless, she doesn't pay much attention to preventing a temporal paradox, and is happy to tell Mason his fate. Her autocritique under the alien alphabet focuses on being a filmic sex symbol instead of a woman of substance. Robin remains more loyal to her contemporary group of Invisibles than the 1990s cell, with her love for King Mob an unanticipated complication.

She is friendly enough with Boy, but remains aloof during her early years, allowing her forceful personality to emerge only after becoming team leader in 1996. She's willing to keep the team in the dark about Quimper's attempted possession for nearly a year, viewing her mission in the past to be his removal from the battle. By fall 1997 Robin is pregnant by King Mob, but decides to return to 'her' Invisibles in 2012 via the timesuit anyway. The device fails, and Robin bounces across space-time before being absorbed into the supercontext, from which she emerges just moments before it envelops reality on December 22, 2012.

REYNARD Reynard is inducted into the Invisibles in 2001 by Dane McGowan, acting as a teacher at her high school. Relieved to get out of school, which she hates, Reynard finds herself enduring a three-year initiation into the team as a trainee accounts manager. [It's unknown whether her code name is chosen or assigned; it may be that Dane calls her Reynard in an ironic remembrance of his own initiation, in which he was chased by fox hunters.] Following the end of her initiation, Reynard spends seven years as an Invisible in Dane's cell.

She thinks of herself as a "postnowist," aggressively modern to the point that she calls Dane "granddad and prefers to assign herself a series of memes rather than a personality. In 2012 Reynard breaks into the Technoccult headquarters with Dane, surprised to discover that it's secretly run by King Mob. As reality collapses into the supercontext, Reynard is unprepared, frightened when Ragged Robin reappears into reality. Ultimately King Mob calms her down, and she enters the supercontext content.

MARQUIS DE SAD€ Donatien Alphonse Franeois Sade (1740-1814) Imprisoned in an asylum in part for works such as Justine and me 120 Days of Sodom, the Marquis de Sade

is freed by the Invisibles during the French revolution when they bring him to 1995 as a tuba thoughtform to


establish a new template for humanity. Although he initially finds the modern world "mad," he soon embraces its possibilities on a trip to the Power Exchange bondage club in San Francisco, inducting the hustler Thierro and a young girl into his cell of Invisibles. Despite wishing to be buried in an unmarked grave with his books destroyed, the Marquis instead transcends death to help usher in the supercontext through changing behaviors and attitudes through his sex research at La Coste. There he constructs an orgone accumulator and develops a new gender, the androgynous non, which is commonplace by 2012.

The Marquis is rather different in person to his writings. Instead of a perverted fantasy, The 120 Days of Sodom is his warning about what humanity will become if it insists on treating people like commodities. Although he embraces sexuality as a means for transforming the world, he is gracious to critics such as Edith and appears primarily interested in helping people, as evidenced by his work with Reichian therapy. He considers "normal" people to be perverts and hopes to one day enable children to grow up free from their parents' foibles. However, despite a revulsion at the sight of the vivisected Myrmidon victim, de Sade is also entranced by its bloody state.

TOM O'BEDLAM Frederick ~arper-seaton(d.1995) Son of a famous mage in the tradition of the Golden Dawn, Frederick Harper-Seaton joins the Invisibles by 1924 - along with his cousin, Edith Manning, with whom he shares a psychic link. He accepts his enhanced mental abilities but is fearful of other magical phenomena [perhaps as a result of his father's occult activities]. Freddie is intimidated by his father, but rebels in small yet meaningful ways. He adopts the name Tom O'Bedlam, demonstrating a blase attitude toward magick and invisiblism. At the same time, there appears to be love and a certain amount of respect for his father, as demonstrated by the debilitating effects of the memory of his death. In many ways, he follows in his father's footsteps. If Tom has a weakness, it is Edith. He is desperately in love with her, and jealous of her sexual exploits. She sees

him as her prot6gC and pet project, and he half-heartedly goes along with her antics in order to spend time with her. Their relationship is quite special on account of their psychic link [they were probably playmates as children]. She may have goaded him into joining the Invisibles [he certainly appears apprehensive of their activities, when not ridiculing the group]. Tom accompanies Edith to her meetings with the Harlequinade in search of the Hand of Glory in 1924, but does not directly assist her. Edith believes Tom is homosexual, which is a supposition he doesn't confirm or deny. [His jealousy over Edith's sexual escapades are possibly related to the fact that he wants her time and attention more than he wants her sexually. Perhaps he views Edith as rather undiscriminating in her choice of lovers, and therefore feels inade-

ANARCHY FOR THE M S E S

quate because he was never chosen.] He behaves in an extremely juvenile fashion in regards to Edith's personal affairs, making snide remarks under his breath and eavesdropping on her while she's having sex. Edith takes over the controlling role in Tom's life from his father, pushing him into uncomfortable places and experiences. His rebellions are weak and ineffectual, and until the incident with the Hand of Glory, Freddie remains very much a child. In 1924, the Invisibles complete the final operation of the Hand, opening a fracture into Universe B. Tom is at ground zero, and as a result goes completely mad for six months. By 1960 Tom has become a mage in the Ordo Templi Orientis under his real name, placing himself on the commanding side of authority for once. During this period he encounters Miles Delacourt. Tom maintains contact with the Invisibles at least through 1988, teaching King Mob how to generate shortcuts across space by using the Universe B intersection. But by 1995 Tom is homeless, living on the streets of London. [Perhaps Delacourt's The Invisibles ruined Tom as it did former Invisible Beryl Wyndham. Or perhaps having experienced both the controlling and subservient modes of authority, he volun-

tarily rejects hierarchy - and by necessity the culture that produces it altogether.] Tom maintains contact with Edith, and agrees in the summer of 1995 to induct Dane McGowan into the Invisibles. [That Tom is entrusted to indoctrinate the "messiah" suggests that he truly is the greatest magician of them all, as Edith always hoped he would be.] Tom is comfortable being homeless, learning to observe reality from a new perspective. He spends a season educating Dane, appearing to develop a real affection for him. He helps Dane defeat his personal demons, which involve his sense of abandonment and loss over his father leaving, and the armor his psyche built to protect him from those feelings. [It's a personal battle that Tom himself may have undertaken and won, and so he is particularly interested in seeing Dane succeed.] Tom eventually induces contact between Dane and BARBELiTH. Before they go their separate ways, Tom compiles his belongings for his protkgk, storing them in a bag in a locker. The bag serves as an inheritance of sorts - shortly afterward, Tom ambles off into the Underground to die, homeless, free of all earthly possessions, the most powerful magician in the world.

As a child, Takashi Satoh is shown how to fold a peculiar origami shape by his mother, who in turn learned it from her father, who died in the Hiroshima bombing. In 1990 Takashi takes a photograph of a cloud formation in New Zealand.

By 1996 Takashi works for Mason Lang in San Francisco, propelled by the belief that he has already unlocked the secret of time travel in his own personal future, building a timesuit shaped like the origami of his childhood and traveling back in time to show his


grandfather. As such, he labors to develop homeopathic software for Lang while secretly waiting for the key to time travel to be delivered to him. The moment arrives when he sees a photograph Robin took of a cloud formation in 1996 that matches his own. Shortly after this he loses his right eye while being tortured by the Yakuza. Takashi does not hold the incident against the Invisibles, opting instead to assist them through his work. By 2009 he has become a fully fledged Invisible, and three years later is poised to launch the world's first timesuit. Takashi is kind, driven to tears by the death of his coworker, Shoji. Yet he isn't necessarily trusting, unsure of whether to believe Robin. He plays rape videogames. He keeps a diary,

and at some point after 1998 begins wearing a turban. After his accident, Takashi sees only in monochrome, yet he refuses to wear a liquid lens to replace his lost eye. By 2012 he is married to a Japanese woman, possibly his girlfriend from 1999. [It's unclear whether Takashi returns to Japan or remains in America, visiting the Invisibles' San Francisco headquarters to test the timesuit. But the bulky and intricate nature of the experiment suggests that Takashi is based in California and has merely installed a traditional rock garden in his home.] On December 22, 2012 Takashi is killed by the descending King-of-AllTears just as the timesuit launches for the first time.

*

E

3

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P J m

"I'm writing a book, I'm floating in a warm ocean


BIBLIOGRAPHY

of living words."

THE INVISIBLES is an extremely literate series, playing with fictional norms and traditions established not only in earlier comic books, but the broader spectrum of literature. Perhaps not surprisingly, several of the characters within the series shared this literacy, namechecking dozens of books through the course of the three volumes. Grant Morrison used THEINVISIRLES' innovative letters column to expand on ideas featured in the series, recommending texts that inspired certain storylines and books for further exploration. Contained here is a complete list of those books, handy for readers wishing to further immerse themselves in the world of Invisiblism. Interestingly, several notable influences - the Illurninatus! trilogy, VALIS - are never mentioned by name, even though occasionally quoted outright in the series.


The 120 Days of Sodom By the Marquis de Sade

Digital Justice By Pepe Moreno

The Marquis de Sade By Robert Del Quiaro

Rapid Eye 3 Edited by Simon Dwyer

The 120 Days of Sodom (play) Adapted by Nick Hedges

The Divine Comedy By Alighieri Dante

Mama Lola By Karen McCarthy Brown

The Sadeian Women By Angela Carter

The Divine Horsemen By Maya Deren

Mary Shelley By Muriel Spark

Secret and Suppressed Edited by Jim Keith

The Ecstasy Club By Douglas Rushkoff

Metal Sushi By David Conway

Sexual Anarchy By Elaine Showalter

Einstein's Dreams By Alan Lightman

Monstrous Cults By Stephen Sennitt

The Shaman's Body By Arnold Mindell

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test By Tom Wolfe

Mutual Aid By Peter Kropotkin

Shelley -The Pursuit By Richard Holmes

Naked Lunch By William S Burroughs

The Starry Wisdom Edited by Dave Mitchell

NLP The New Technology of Achievement Edited by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner

The Teachings of Don Carlos By Victor Sanchez

1984 By George Orwell

Alien Identities By Richard L Thompson Ariel By Andre Maurois Atlas Shrugged By Ayn Rand Aztec and Maya Myths By Karl Taube

Extraterrestrial Friends and Foes By George C Andrews

The Big Book of Conspiracies By Doug Moench

Frankenstein By Mary Shelley

Bloody Poetry By Howard Brenton

The Great Gatsby By F Scott Fitzgerald

The Cat in the Hat By Dr. Suess

The Guillotine and the Terror By Daniel Arasse

Chaos Ritual By Steve Wilson Chaosmosis By Jason Hoelscher Coleridge: Early Visions By Richard Holmes Come Before Christ and Murder Love By Stewart Home Condensed Chaos By Phil Hine The Cornelius Chronicles By Michael Moorcock Cyberia By Douglas Rushkoff Dark Eros By Thomas Moore

Haunted Britain By Anthony D Hippisley Coxe Historical llluminatus By Robert Anton Wilson The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail By Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln Hotter Blood Edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett Hottest Blood Edited by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett The llluminoids By Neal Wilgus Lord Halifax's Complete Ghost Book Edited by Charles Lindley

On the Bus By Ken Babbs and Paul Perry One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest By Ken Kesey The Passionate Philosopher: A de Sade Reader Selected and translated by Margaret Crossland Physical Interrogation Techniques By Richard Krousher Pissing Away the American Dream Edited by David Rees Poetical Works By Bysshe Shelley Prime Chaos By Phil Hine Quantum Psychology By Robert Anton Wilson

The Third Policeman By Flann O'Brien The Tree of Lies By Christopher S Hyatt Ulysses By James Joyce Undoing Yourself with Energized Meditation and Other Devices By Christopher S Hyatt A Vindication of the Rights of Women By Mary Wollstonecraft Voodoo and Hoodoo By Jim Haskins The Voudoun Gnostic WorkbookBy Michael Bertiaux When the Whip Comes Down By Jeremy Reed Words of Fire, Deeds of Blood By Olivier Bernier

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Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult

Opium for the Masses: A Practical Guide to Growing Poppies and Making Opium

You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths

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The Complete Guide to Property Development for the Small Investor

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Vision's Invisibles: Philosophical Explorations

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Anarchy For The Masses: The Disinformation Guide to The Invisibles

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The Three Low Masses

The Revolt of the Masses

The Floodgates of Anarchy

The European Anarchy

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The Logic of Anarchy

Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult

Opium for the Masses: A Practical Guide to Growing Poppies and Making Opium

You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths

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You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths

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